Autonomous Motion
Note: This department has relocated.

Reinforcement learning for operational space control

2007

Conference Paper

am

ei


While operational space control is of essential importance for robotics and well-understood from an analytical point of view, it can be prohibitively hard to achieve accurate control in face of modeling errors, which are inevitable in complex robots, e.g., humanoid robots. In such cases, learning control methods can offer an interesting alternative to analytical control algorithms. However, the resulting supervised learning problem is ill-defined as it requires to learn an inverse mapping of a usually redundant system, which is well known to suffer from the property of non-convexity of the solution space, i.e., the learning system could generate motor commands that try to steer the robot into physically impossible configurations. The important insight that many operational space control algorithms can be reformulated as optimal control problems, however, allows addressing this inverse learning problem in the framework of reinforcement learning. However, few of the known optimization or reinforcement learning algorithms can be used in online learning control for robots, as they are either prohibitively slow, do not scale to interesting domains of complex robots, or require trying out policies generated by random search, which are infeasible for a physical system. Using a generalization of the EM-based reinforcement learning framework suggested by Dayan & Hinton, we reduce the problem of learning with immediate rewards to a reward-weighted regression problem with an adaptive, integrated reward transformation for faster convergence. The resulting algorithm is efficient, learns smoothly without dangerous jumps in solution space, and works well in applications of complex high degree-of-freedom robots.

Author(s): Peters, J. and Schaal, S.
Book Title: Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Pages: 2111-2116
Year: 2007
Publisher: IEEE Computer Society

Department(s): Autonomous Motion, Empirical Inference
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)

DOI: 10.1109/ROBOT.2007.363633
Event Name: ICRA 2007
Event Place: Roma, Italy

Cross Ref: p2670
Note: clmc
URL: http://www-clmc.usc.edu/publications/P/peters-ICRA2007.pdf

BibTex

@inproceedings{Peters_ICRA_2007,
  title = {Reinforcement learning for operational space control},
  author = {Peters, J. and Schaal, S.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
  pages = {2111-2116},
  publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
  year = {2007},
  note = {clmc},
  crossref = {p2670},
  doi = {10.1109/ROBOT.2007.363633},
  url = {http://www-clmc.usc.edu/publications/P/peters-ICRA2007.pdf}
}