In plain words: Instead of hand-building separate vision, state-estimation, and motor-control pieces, this trains one network that turns raw camera images straight into motor torques. It learned real tasks needing tight hand-eye coordination, like screwing a cap onto a bottle, without those hand-designed parts.
Abstract · End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies
Policy search methods can allow robots to learn control policies for a wide range of tasks, but practical applications of policy search often require hand-engineered components for perception, state estimation, and low-level control. In this paper, we aim to answer the following question: does training the perception and control systems jointly end-to-end provide better performance than training each component separately? To this end, we develop a method that can be used to learn policies that map raw image observations directly to torques at the robot's motors. The policies are represented by deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with 92,000 parameters, and are trained using a partially observed guided policy search method, which transforms policy search into supervised learning, with supervision provided by a simple trajectory-centric reinforcement learning method. We evaluate our method on a range of real-world manipulation tasks that require close coordination between vision and control, such as screwing a cap onto a bottle, and present simulated comparisons to a range of prior policy search methods.
Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Trevor Darrell, Pieter Abbeel
arXiv:1504.00702 · cs.LG, cs.CV, cs.RO · submitted Apr 2, 2015 · updated Apr 19, 2016
abstract · pdf · html · updating with revisions for JMLR final version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeVppkoloXs
Talk about the paper:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtMyH_--vnU
Related talk from ICLR 2015: David Silver (Google DeepMind) "Deep Reinforcement Learning" (May 22, 2015)
https://youtu.be/EX1CIVVkWdE