Sample-efficient Reinforcement Learning in Robotic Table Tennis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tebbe, Jonas, Krauch, Lukas, Gao, Yapeng, Zell, Andreas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2020
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author Tebbe, Jonas
Krauch, Lukas
Gao, Yapeng
Zell, Andreas
author_facet Tebbe, Jonas
Krauch, Lukas
Gao, Yapeng
Zell, Andreas
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved some impressive recent successes in various computer games and simulations. Most of these successes are based on having large numbers of episodes from which the agent can learn. In typical robotic applications, however, the number of feasible attempts is very limited. In this paper we present a sample-efficient RL algorithm applied to the example of a table tennis robot. In table tennis every stroke is different, with varying placement, speed and spin. An accurate return therefore has to be found depending on a high-dimensional continuous state space. To make learning in few trials possible the method is embedded into our robot system. In this way we can use a one-step environment. The state space depends on the ball at hitting time (position, velocity, spin) and the action is the racket state (orientation, velocity) at hitting. An actor-critic based deterministic policy gradient algorithm was developed for accelerated learning. Our approach performs competitively both in a simulation and on the real robot in a number of challenging scenarios. Accurate results are obtained without pre-training in under $200$ episodes of training. The video presenting our experiments is available at https://youtu.be/uRAtdoL6Wpw.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2011_03275
institution arXiv
publishDate 2020
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sample-efficient Reinforcement Learning in Robotic Table Tennis
Tebbe, Jonas
Krauch, Lukas
Gao, Yapeng
Zell, Andreas
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved some impressive recent successes in various computer games and simulations. Most of these successes are based on having large numbers of episodes from which the agent can learn. In typical robotic applications, however, the number of feasible attempts is very limited. In this paper we present a sample-efficient RL algorithm applied to the example of a table tennis robot. In table tennis every stroke is different, with varying placement, speed and spin. An accurate return therefore has to be found depending on a high-dimensional continuous state space. To make learning in few trials possible the method is embedded into our robot system. In this way we can use a one-step environment. The state space depends on the ball at hitting time (position, velocity, spin) and the action is the racket state (orientation, velocity) at hitting. An actor-critic based deterministic policy gradient algorithm was developed for accelerated learning. Our approach performs competitively both in a simulation and on the real robot in a number of challenging scenarios. Accurate results are obtained without pre-training in under $200$ episodes of training. The video presenting our experiments is available at https://youtu.be/uRAtdoL6Wpw.
title Sample-efficient Reinforcement Learning in Robotic Table Tennis
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.03275