The Power of Input: Benchmarking Zero-Shot Sim-To-Real Transfer of Reinforcement Learning Control Policies for Quadrotor Control

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Dionigi, Alberto, Costante, Gabriele, Loianno, Giuseppe
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Dionigi, Alberto
Costante, Gabriele
Loianno, Giuseppe
author_facet Dionigi, Alberto
Costante, Gabriele
Loianno, Giuseppe
contents In the last decade, data-driven approaches have become popular choices for quadrotor control, thanks to their ability to facilitate the adaptation to unknown or uncertain flight conditions. Among the different data-driven paradigms, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is currently one of the most explored. However, the design of DRL agents for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) remains an open challenge. While some works have studied the output configuration of these agents (i.e., what kind of control to compute), there is no general consensus on the type of input data these approaches should employ. Multiple works simply provide the DRL agent with full state information, without questioning if this might be redundant and unnecessarily complicate the learning process, or pose superfluous constraints on the availability of such information in real platforms. In this work, we provide an in-depth benchmark analysis of different configurations of the observation space. We optimize multiple DRL agents in simulated environments with different input choices and study their robustness and their sim-to-real transfer capabilities with zero-shot adaptation. We believe that the outcomes and discussions presented in this work supported by extensive experimental results could be an important milestone in guiding future research on the development of DRL agents for aerial robot tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_07686
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Power of Input: Benchmarking Zero-Shot Sim-To-Real Transfer of Reinforcement Learning Control Policies for Quadrotor Control
Dionigi, Alberto
Costante, Gabriele
Loianno, Giuseppe
Robotics
In the last decade, data-driven approaches have become popular choices for quadrotor control, thanks to their ability to facilitate the adaptation to unknown or uncertain flight conditions. Among the different data-driven paradigms, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is currently one of the most explored. However, the design of DRL agents for Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) remains an open challenge. While some works have studied the output configuration of these agents (i.e., what kind of control to compute), there is no general consensus on the type of input data these approaches should employ. Multiple works simply provide the DRL agent with full state information, without questioning if this might be redundant and unnecessarily complicate the learning process, or pose superfluous constraints on the availability of such information in real platforms. In this work, we provide an in-depth benchmark analysis of different configurations of the observation space. We optimize multiple DRL agents in simulated environments with different input choices and study their robustness and their sim-to-real transfer capabilities with zero-shot adaptation. We believe that the outcomes and discussions presented in this work supported by extensive experimental results could be an important milestone in guiding future research on the development of DRL agents for aerial robot tasks.
title The Power of Input: Benchmarking Zero-Shot Sim-To-Real Transfer of Reinforcement Learning Control Policies for Quadrotor Control
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07686