In plain words: People label a few demonstrations with rough score curves, teaching the robot a scoring function for tasks where success can't be measured directly. It then trains from a shared pile of past recordings, learning to stack objects and handle cloth on a real robot.
Abstract · Scaling data-driven robotics with reward sketching and batch reinforcement learning
We present a framework for data-driven robotics that makes use of a large dataset of recorded robot experience and scales to several tasks using learned reward functions. We show how to apply this framework to accomplish three different object manipulation tasks on a real robot platform. Given demonstrations of a task together with task-agnostic recorded experience, we use a special form of human annotation as supervision to learn a reward function, which enables us to deal with real-world tasks where the reward signal cannot be acquired directly. Learned rewards are used in combination with a large dataset of experience from different tasks to learn a robot policy offline using batch RL. We show that using our approach it is possible to train agents to perform a variety of challenging manipulation tasks including stacking rigid objects and handling cloth.
Serkan Cabi, Sergio Gómez Colmenarejo, Alexander Novikov, Ksenia Konyushkova, Scott Reed, Rae Jeong, Konrad Zolna, Yusuf Aytar, David Budden, Mel Vecerik, Oleg Sushkov, David Barker, et al.
arXiv:1909.12200 · cs.RO, cs.LG · submitted Sep 26, 2019 · updated Jun 4, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/data-driven-robotics/