RAIL: Reachability-Aided Imitation Learning for Safe Policy Execution

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Jung, Wonsuhk, Anthony, Dennis, Mishra, Utkarsh A., Arachchige, Nadun Ranawaka, Bronars, Matthew, Xu, Danfei, Kousik, Shreyas
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Jung, Wonsuhk
Anthony, Dennis
Mishra, Utkarsh A.
Arachchige, Nadun Ranawaka
Bronars, Matthew
Xu, Danfei
Kousik, Shreyas
author_facet Jung, Wonsuhk
Anthony, Dennis
Mishra, Utkarsh A.
Arachchige, Nadun Ranawaka
Bronars, Matthew
Xu, Danfei
Kousik, Shreyas
contents Imitation learning (IL) has shown great success in learning complex robot manipulation tasks. However, there remains a need for practical safety methods to justify widespread deployment. In particular, it is important to certify that a system obeys hard constraints on unsafe behavior in settings when it is unacceptable to design a tradeoff between performance and safety via tuning the policy (i.e. soft constraints). This leads to the question, how does enforcing hard constraints impact the performance (meaning safely completing tasks) of an IL policy? To answer this question, this paper builds a reachability-based safety filter to enforce hard constraints on IL, which we call Reachability-Aided Imitation Learning (RAIL). Through evaluations with state-of-the-art IL policies in mobile robots and manipulation tasks, we make two key findings. First, the highest-performing policies are sometimes only so because they frequently violate constraints, and significantly lose performance under hard constraints. Second, surprisingly, hard constraints on the lower-performing policies can occasionally increase their ability to perform tasks safely. Finally, hardware evaluation confirms the method can operate in real time.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_19190
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RAIL: Reachability-Aided Imitation Learning for Safe Policy Execution
Jung, Wonsuhk
Anthony, Dennis
Mishra, Utkarsh A.
Arachchige, Nadun Ranawaka
Bronars, Matthew
Xu, Danfei
Kousik, Shreyas
Robotics
Imitation learning (IL) has shown great success in learning complex robot manipulation tasks. However, there remains a need for practical safety methods to justify widespread deployment. In particular, it is important to certify that a system obeys hard constraints on unsafe behavior in settings when it is unacceptable to design a tradeoff between performance and safety via tuning the policy (i.e. soft constraints). This leads to the question, how does enforcing hard constraints impact the performance (meaning safely completing tasks) of an IL policy? To answer this question, this paper builds a reachability-based safety filter to enforce hard constraints on IL, which we call Reachability-Aided Imitation Learning (RAIL). Through evaluations with state-of-the-art IL policies in mobile robots and manipulation tasks, we make two key findings. First, the highest-performing policies are sometimes only so because they frequently violate constraints, and significantly lose performance under hard constraints. Second, surprisingly, hard constraints on the lower-performing policies can occasionally increase their ability to perform tasks safely. Finally, hardware evaluation confirms the method can operate in real time.
title RAIL: Reachability-Aided Imitation Learning for Safe Policy Execution
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.19190