In plain words: A learned dreamer predicts how camera images change when the robot acts, so it can practice in imagination instead of the real world. Policies trained this way still worked on a real robot, avoiding millions of real trials.
Abstract
Learning to control robots directly based on images is a primary challenge in robotics. However, many existing reinforcement learning approaches require iteratively obtaining millions of robot samples to learn a policy, which can take significant time. In this paper, we focus on learning a realistic world model capturing the dynamics of scene changes conditioned on robot actions. Our dreaming model can emulate samples equivalent to a sequence of images from the actual environment, technically by learning an action-conditioned future representation/scene regressor. This allows the agent to learn action policies (i.e., visuomotor policies) by interacting with the dreaming model rather than the real-world. We experimentally confirm that our dreaming model enables robot learning of policies that transfer to the real-world.
AJ Piergiovanni, Alan Wu, Michael S. Ryoo
arXiv:1805.07813 · cs.RO, cs.CV, stat.ML · submitted May 20, 2018 · updated Aug 1, 2019
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