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Robust Deep Reinforcement Learning for Quadcopter Control (arxiv.org)
3 points by adipandas on Nov 9, 2021 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A drone-flying policy is trained to assume the worst-case conditions it might meet, so it keeps working when the world changes. In simulator tests with unseen settings, it beat policies trained the usual way on one fixed setting.

Abstract

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has made it possible to solve complex robotics problems using neural networks as function approximators. However, the policies trained on stationary environments suffer in terms of generalization when transferred from one environment to another. In this work, we use Robust Markov Decision Processes (RMDP) to train the drone control policy, which combines ideas from Robust Control and RL. It opts for pessimistic optimization to handle potential gaps between policy transfer from one environment to another. The trained control policy is tested on the task of quadcopter positional control. RL agents were trained in a MuJoCo simulator. During testing, different environment parameters (unseen during the training) were used to validate the robustness of the trained policy for transfer from one environment to another. The robust policy outperformed the standard agents in these environments, suggesting that the added robustness increases generality and can adapt to non-stationary environments. Codes: https://github.com/adipandas/gym_multirotor

Aditya M. Deshpande, Ali A. Minai, Manish Kumar
arXiv:2111.03915 · cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG, eess.SY, math.OC · submitted Nov 6, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · 6 pages; 3 Figures; Accepted in https://mecc2021.a2c2.org/

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