Robotic catheterization is typically used for percutaneous coronary intervention procedures nowadays and it involves steering flexible endovascular tools to open up occlusion in the coronaries. In this study, a sample-efficient deep reinforcement learning with episodic policy transfer is, for the first time, used for motion control during robotic catheterization with fully adaptive PID tuning strategy. The reinforcement model aids the agent to continuously learn from its interactions in its environment and adaptively tune PID control gains for axial navigation of endovascular tool. The model was validated for axial motion control of a robotic system designed for intravascular catheterization. Simulation and experimental trials were done to validate the application of the model, and results obtained shows it could self-tune PID gains appropriately for motion control of a robotic catheter system. Performance comparison with conventional methods in average of 10 trials shows the agent tunes the gain better with error of 0.003 mm. Thus, the proposed model would offer more stable set-point motion control robotic catheterization.
State of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms are sample inefficient due to the large number of episodes they require to achieve asymptotic performance. Episodic Reinforcement Learning (ERL) algorithms, inspired by the mammalian hippocampus, typically use extended memory systems to bootstrap learning from past events to overcome this sample-inefficiency problem. However, such memory augmentations are often used as mere buffers, from which isolated past experiences are drawn to learn from in an offline fashion (e.g., replay). Here, we demonstrate that including a bias in the acquired memory content derived from the order of episodic sampling improves both the sample and memory efficiency of an episodic control algorithm. We test our Sequential Episodic Control (SEC) model in a foraging task to show that storing and using integrated episodes as event sequences leads to faster learning with fewer memory requirements as opposed to a standard ERL benchmark, Model-Free Episodic Control, that buffers isolated events only. We also study the effect of memory constraints and forgetting on the sequential and non-sequential version of the SEC algorithm. Furthermore, we discuss how a hippocampal-like fast memory system could bootstrap slow cortical and subcortical learning subserving habit formation in the mammalian brain.
We study lifelong visual perception in an embodied setup, where we develop new models and compare various agents that navigate in buildings and occasionally request annotations which, in turn, are used to refine their visual perception capabilities. The purpose of the agents is to recognize objects and other semantic classes in the whole building at the end of a process that combines exploration and active visual learning. As we study this task in a lifelong learning context, the agents should use knowledge gained in earlier visited environments in order to guide their exploration and active learning strategy in successively visited buildings. We use the semantic segmentation performance as a proxy for general visual perception and study this novel task for several exploration and annotation methods, ranging from frontier exploration baselines which use heuristic active learning, to a fully learnable approach. For the latter, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning (RL) based agent which jointly learns both navigation and active learning. A point goal navigation formulation, coupled with a global planner which supplies goals, is integrated into the RL model in order to provide further incentives for systematic exploration of novel scenes. By performing extensive experiments on the Matterport3D dataset, we show how the proposed agents can utilize knowledge from previously explored scenes when exploring new ones, e.g. through less granular exploration and less frequent requests for annotations. The results also suggest that a learning-based agent is able to use its prior visual knowledge more effectively than heuristic alternatives.
Deep reinforcement learning suggests the promise of fully automated learning of robotic control policies that directly map sensory inputs to low-level actions. However, applying deep reinforcement learning methods on real-world robots is exceptionally difficult, due both to the sample complexity and, just as importantly, the sensitivity of such methods to hyperparameters. While hyperparameter tuning can be performed in parallel in simulated domains, it is usually impractical to tune hyperparameters directly on real-world robotic platforms, especially legged platforms like quadrupedal robots that can be damaged through extensive trial-and-error learning. In this paper, we develop a stable variant of the soft actor-critic deep reinforcement learning algorithm that requires minimal hyperparameter tuning, while also requiring only a modest number of trials to learn multilayer neural network policies. This algorithm is based on the framework of maximum entropy reinforcement learning, and automatically trades off exploration against exploitation by dynamically and automatically tuning a temperature parameter that determines the stochasticity of the policy. We show that this method achieves state-of-the-art performance on four standard benchmark environments. We then demonstrate that it can be used to learn quadrupedal locomotion gaits on a real-world Minitaur robot, learning to walk from scratch directly in the real world in two hours of training.
Recent studies have shown the vulnerability of reinforcement learning (RL) models in noisy settings. The sources of noises differ across scenarios. For instance, in practice, the observed reward channel is often subject to noise (e.g., when observed rewards are collected through sensors), and thus observed rewards may not be credible as a result. Also, in applications such as robotics, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm can be manipulated to produce arbitrary errors. In this paper, we consider noisy RL problems where observed rewards by RL agents are generated with a reward confusion matrix. We call such observed rewards as perturbed rewards. We develop an unbiased reward estimator aided robust RL framework that enables RL agents to learn in noisy environments while observing only perturbed rewards. Our framework draws upon approaches for supervised learning with noisy data. The core ideas of our solution include estimating a reward confusion matrix and defining a set of unbiased surrogate rewards. We prove the convergence and sample complexity of our approach. Extensive experiments on different DRL platforms show that policies based on our estimated surrogate reward can achieve higher expected rewards, and converge faster than existing baselines. For instance, the state-of-the-art PPO algorithm is able to obtain 67.5% and 46.7% improvements in average on five Atari games, when the error rates are 10% and 30% respectively.
Machine learning algorithms have found several applications in the field of robotics and control systems. The control systems community has started to show interest towards several machine learning algorithms from the sub-domains such as supervised learning, imitation learning and reinforcement learning to achieve autonomous control and intelligent decision making. Amongst many complex control problems, stable bipedal walking has been the most challenging problem. In this paper, we present an architecture to design and simulate a planar bipedal walking robot(BWR) using a realistic robotics simulator, Gazebo. The robot demonstrates successful walking behaviour by learning through several of its trial and errors, without any prior knowledge of itself or the world dynamics. The autonomous walking of the BWR is achieved using reinforcement learning algorithm called Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient(DDPG). DDPG is one of the algorithms for learning controls in continuous action spaces. After training the model in simulation, it was observed that, with a proper shaped reward function, the robot achieved faster walking or even rendered a running gait with an average speed of 0.83 m/s. The gait pattern of the bipedal walker was compared with the actual human walking pattern. The results show that the bipedal walking pattern had similar characteristics to that of a human walking pattern.
Autonomous urban driving navigation with complex multi-agent dynamics is under-explored due to the difficulty of learning an optimal driving policy. The traditional modular pipeline heavily relies on hand-designed rules and the pre-processing perception system while the supervised learning-based models are limited by the accessibility of extensive human experience. We present a general and principled Controllable Imitative Reinforcement Learning (CIRL) approach which successfully makes the driving agent achieve higher success rates based on only vision inputs in a high-fidelity car simulator. To alleviate the low exploration efficiency for large continuous action space that often prohibits the use of classical RL on challenging real tasks, our CIRL explores over a reasonably constrained action space guided by encoded experiences that imitate human demonstrations, building upon Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG). Moreover, we propose to specialize adaptive policies and steering-angle reward designs for different control signals (i.e. follow, straight, turn right, turn left) based on the shared representations to improve the model capability in tackling with diverse cases. Extensive experiments on CARLA driving benchmark demonstrate that CIRL substantially outperforms all previous methods in terms of the percentage of successfully completed episodes on a variety of goal-directed driving tasks. We also show its superior generalization capability in unseen environments. To our knowledge, this is the first successful case of the learned driving policy through reinforcement learning in the high-fidelity simulator, which performs better-than supervised imitation learning.
Most policy search algorithms require thousands of training episodes to find an effective policy, which is often infeasible with a physical robot. This survey article focuses on the extreme other end of the spectrum: how can a robot adapt with only a handful of trials (a dozen) and a few minutes? By analogy with the word "big-data", we refer to this challenge as "micro-data reinforcement learning". We show that a first strategy is to leverage prior knowledge on the policy structure (e.g., dynamic movement primitives), on the policy parameters (e.g., demonstrations), or on the dynamics (e.g., simulators). A second strategy is to create data-driven surrogate models of the expected reward (e.g., Bayesian optimization) or the dynamical model (e.g., model-based policy search), so that the policy optimizer queries the model instead of the real system. Overall, all successful micro-data algorithms combine these two strategies by varying the kind of model and prior knowledge. The current scientific challenges essentially revolve around scaling up to complex robots (e.g., humanoids), designing generic priors, and optimizing the computing time.
Inferring other agents' mental states such as their knowledge, beliefs and intentions is thought to be essential for effective interactions with other agents. Recently, multiagent systems trained via deep reinforcement learning have been shown to succeed in solving different tasks, but it remains unclear how each agent modeled or represented other agents in their environment. In this work we test whether deep reinforcement learning agents explicitly represent other agents' intentions (their specific aims or goals) during a task in which the agents had to coordinate the covering of different spots in a 2D environment. In particular, we tracked over time the performance of a linear decoder trained to predict the final goal of all agents from the hidden state of each agent's neural network controller. We observed that the hidden layers of agents represented explicit information about other agents' goals, i.e. the target landmark they ended up covering. We also performed a series of experiments, in which some agents were replaced by others with fixed goals, to test the level of generalization of the trained agents. We noticed that during the training phase the agents developed a differential preference for each goal, which hindered generalization. To alleviate the above problem, we propose simple changes to the MADDPG training algorithm which leads to better generalization against unseen agents. We believe that training protocols promoting more active intention reading mechanisms, e.g. by preventing simple symmetry-breaking solutions, is a promising direction towards achieving a more robust generalization in different cooperative and competitive tasks.
This paper introduces a novel neural network-based reinforcement learning approach for robot gaze control. Our approach enables a robot to learn and to adapt its gaze control strategy for human-robot interaction neither with the use of external sensors nor with human supervision. The robot learns to focus its attention onto groups of people from its own audio-visual experiences, independently of the number of people, of their positions and of their physical appearances. In particular, we use a recurrent neural network architecture in combination with Q-learning to find an optimal action-selection policy; we pre-train the network using a simulated environment that mimics realistic scenarios that involve speaking/silent participants, thus avoiding the need of tedious sessions of a robot interacting with people. Our experimental evaluation suggests that the proposed method is robust against parameter estimation, i.e. the parameter values yielded by the method do not have a decisive impact on the performance. The best results are obtained when both audio and visual information is jointly used. Experiments with the Nao robot indicate that our framework is a step forward towards the autonomous learning of socially acceptable gaze behavior.
This paper presents a safety-aware learning framework that employs an adaptive model learning method together with barrier certificates for systems with possibly nonstationary agent dynamics. To extract the dynamic structure of the model, we use a sparse optimization technique, and the resulting model will be used in combination with control barrier certificates which constrain feedback controllers only when safety is about to be violated. Under some mild assumptions, solutions to the constrained feedback-controller optimization are guaranteed to be globally optimal, and the monotonic improvement of a feedback controller is thus ensured. In addition, we reformulate the (action-)value function approximation to make any kernel-based nonlinear function estimation method applicable. We then employ a state-of-the-art kernel adaptive filtering technique for the (action-)value function approximation. The resulting framework is verified experimentally on a brushbot, whose dynamics is unknown and highly complex.