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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Saunders, Jack, Saeedi, Sajad, Li, Wenbin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.11094
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author Saunders, Jack
Saeedi, Sajad
Li, Wenbin
author_facet Saunders, Jack
Saeedi, Sajad
Li, Wenbin
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) is an agent-based approach for teaching robots to navigate within the physical world. Gathering data for RL is known to be a laborious task, and real-world experiments can be risky. Simulators facilitate the collection of training data in a quicker and more cost-effective manner. However, RL frequently requires a significant number of simulation steps for an agent to become skilful at simple tasks. This is a prevalent issue within the field of RL-based visual quadrotor navigation where state dimensions are typically very large and dynamic models are complex. Furthermore, rendering images and obtaining physical properties of the agent can be computationally expensive. To solve this, we present a simulation framework, built on AirSim, which provides efficient parallel training. Building on this framework, Ape-X is modified to incorporate decentralised training of AirSim environments to make use of numerous networked computers. Through experiments we were able to achieve a reduction in training time from 3.9 hours to 11 minutes using the aforementioned framework and a total of 74 agents and two networked computers. Further details including a github repo and videos about our project, PRL4AirSim, can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/prl4airsim/home
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2209_11094
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Parallel Reinforcement Learning Simulation for Visual Quadrotor Navigation
Saunders, Jack
Saeedi, Sajad
Li, Wenbin
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Reinforcement learning (RL) is an agent-based approach for teaching robots to navigate within the physical world. Gathering data for RL is known to be a laborious task, and real-world experiments can be risky. Simulators facilitate the collection of training data in a quicker and more cost-effective manner. However, RL frequently requires a significant number of simulation steps for an agent to become skilful at simple tasks. This is a prevalent issue within the field of RL-based visual quadrotor navigation where state dimensions are typically very large and dynamic models are complex. Furthermore, rendering images and obtaining physical properties of the agent can be computationally expensive. To solve this, we present a simulation framework, built on AirSim, which provides efficient parallel training. Building on this framework, Ape-X is modified to incorporate decentralised training of AirSim environments to make use of numerous networked computers. Through experiments we were able to achieve a reduction in training time from 3.9 hours to 11 minutes using the aforementioned framework and a total of 74 agents and two networked computers. Further details including a github repo and videos about our project, PRL4AirSim, can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/prl4airsim/home
title Parallel Reinforcement Learning Simulation for Visual Quadrotor Navigation
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.11094