State Representations as Incentives for Reinforcement Learning Agents: A Sim2Real Analysis on Robotic Grasping

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Petropoulakis, Panagiotis, Gräf, Ludwig, Malmir, Mohammadhossein, Josifovski, Josip, Knoll, Alois
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866917743681339392
author Petropoulakis, Panagiotis
Gräf, Ludwig
Malmir, Mohammadhossein
Josifovski, Josip
Knoll, Alois
author_facet Petropoulakis, Panagiotis
Gräf, Ludwig
Malmir, Mohammadhossein
Josifovski, Josip
Knoll, Alois
contents Choosing an appropriate representation of the environment for the underlying decision-making process of the reinforcement learning agent is not always straightforward. The state representation should be inclusive enough to allow the agent to informatively decide on its actions and disentangled enough to simplify policy training and the corresponding sim2real transfer. Given this outlook, this work examines the effect of various representations in incentivizing the agent to solve a specific robotic task: antipodal and planar object grasping. A continuum of state representations is defined, starting from hand-crafted numerical states to encoded image-based representations, with decreasing levels of induced task-specific knowledge. The effects of each representation on the ability of the agent to solve the task in simulation and the transferability of the learned policy to the real robot are examined and compared against a model-based approach with complete system knowledge. The results show that reinforcement learning agents using numerical states can perform on par with non-learning baselines. Furthermore, we find that agents using image-based representations from pre-trained environment embedding vectors perform better than end-to-end trained agents, and hypothesize that separation of representation learning from reinforcement learning can benefit sim2real transfer. Finally, we conclude that incentivizing the state representation with task-specific knowledge facilitates faster convergence for agent training and increases success rates in sim2real robot control.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_11984
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle State Representations as Incentives for Reinforcement Learning Agents: A Sim2Real Analysis on Robotic Grasping
Petropoulakis, Panagiotis
Gräf, Ludwig
Malmir, Mohammadhossein
Josifovski, Josip
Knoll, Alois
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Choosing an appropriate representation of the environment for the underlying decision-making process of the reinforcement learning agent is not always straightforward. The state representation should be inclusive enough to allow the agent to informatively decide on its actions and disentangled enough to simplify policy training and the corresponding sim2real transfer. Given this outlook, this work examines the effect of various representations in incentivizing the agent to solve a specific robotic task: antipodal and planar object grasping. A continuum of state representations is defined, starting from hand-crafted numerical states to encoded image-based representations, with decreasing levels of induced task-specific knowledge. The effects of each representation on the ability of the agent to solve the task in simulation and the transferability of the learned policy to the real robot are examined and compared against a model-based approach with complete system knowledge. The results show that reinforcement learning agents using numerical states can perform on par with non-learning baselines. Furthermore, we find that agents using image-based representations from pre-trained environment embedding vectors perform better than end-to-end trained agents, and hypothesize that separation of representation learning from reinforcement learning can benefit sim2real transfer. Finally, we conclude that incentivizing the state representation with task-specific knowledge facilitates faster convergence for agent training and increases success rates in sim2real robot control.
title State Representations as Incentives for Reinforcement Learning Agents: A Sim2Real Analysis on Robotic Grasping
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.11984