MRDRL-ROS: A Multi Robot Deep Reinforcement Learning Platform based on Robot Operating System

Abstract

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has greatly improved the intelligence of AI in recent years and the community has proposed several common software to facilitate the development of DRL. However, in robotics the utility of common DRL software is limited and the development is time-consuming due to the complexity of various robot software. In this paper, we propose a software engineering approach leveraging modularity to facilitate robot DRL development. The platform decouples learning environment into task, simulator and hierarchical robot modules, which in turn enables diverse environment generation using existing modules as building blocks, regardless of the underlying robot software details. Experimental results show that our platform provides composable environment building, introduces high module reuse and efficiently facilitates robot DRL.