A novel agent with formal goal-reaching guarantees: an experimental study with a mobile robot

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Yaremenko, Grigory, Dobriborsci, Dmitrii, Zashchitin, Roman, Maestre, Ruben Contreras, Hoang, Ngoc Quoc Huy, Osinenko, Pavel
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866916406811951104
author Yaremenko, Grigory
Dobriborsci, Dmitrii
Zashchitin, Roman
Maestre, Ruben Contreras
Hoang, Ngoc Quoc Huy
Osinenko, Pavel
author_facet Yaremenko, Grigory
Dobriborsci, Dmitrii
Zashchitin, Roman
Maestre, Ruben Contreras
Hoang, Ngoc Quoc Huy
Osinenko, Pavel
contents Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective and convenient for a number of tasks in robotics. However, it requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, many of which may be unsafe or unimportant. For instance, online model-free learning can be hazardous and inefficient in the absence of guarantees that a certain set of desired states will be reached during an episode. An increasingly common approach to address safety involves the addition of a shielding system that constrains the RL actions to a safe set of actions. In turn, a difficulty for such frameworks is how to effectively couple RL with the shielding system to make sure the exploration is not excessively restricted. This work presents a novel safe model-free RL agent called Critic As Lyapunov Function (CALF) and showcases how CALF can be used to improve upon control baselines in robotics in an efficient and convenient fashion while ensuring guarantees of stable goal reaching. The latter is a crucial part of safety, as seen generally. With CALF all state-action pairs remain explorable and yet reaching of desired goal states is formally guaranteed. Formal analysis is provided that shows the goal stabilization-ensuring properties of CALF and a set of real-world and numerical experiments with a non-holonomic wheeled mobile robot (WMR) TurtleBot3 Burger confirmed the superiority of CALF over such a well-established RL agent as proximal policy optimization (PPO), and a modified version of SARSA in a few-episode setting in terms of attained total cost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_14867
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A novel agent with formal goal-reaching guarantees: an experimental study with a mobile robot
Yaremenko, Grigory
Dobriborsci, Dmitrii
Zashchitin, Roman
Maestre, Ruben Contreras
Hoang, Ngoc Quoc Huy
Osinenko, Pavel
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Dynamical Systems
Optimization and Control
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective and convenient for a number of tasks in robotics. However, it requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, many of which may be unsafe or unimportant. For instance, online model-free learning can be hazardous and inefficient in the absence of guarantees that a certain set of desired states will be reached during an episode. An increasingly common approach to address safety involves the addition of a shielding system that constrains the RL actions to a safe set of actions. In turn, a difficulty for such frameworks is how to effectively couple RL with the shielding system to make sure the exploration is not excessively restricted. This work presents a novel safe model-free RL agent called Critic As Lyapunov Function (CALF) and showcases how CALF can be used to improve upon control baselines in robotics in an efficient and convenient fashion while ensuring guarantees of stable goal reaching. The latter is a crucial part of safety, as seen generally. With CALF all state-action pairs remain explorable and yet reaching of desired goal states is formally guaranteed. Formal analysis is provided that shows the goal stabilization-ensuring properties of CALF and a set of real-world and numerical experiments with a non-holonomic wheeled mobile robot (WMR) TurtleBot3 Burger confirmed the superiority of CALF over such a well-established RL agent as proximal policy optimization (PPO), and a modified version of SARSA in a few-episode setting in terms of attained total cost.
title A novel agent with formal goal-reaching guarantees: an experimental study with a mobile robot
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Dynamical Systems
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14867