A Simulation Pipeline to Facilitate Real-World Robotic Reinforcement Learning Applications

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Silveira, Jefferson, Marshall, Joshua A., Givigi Jr, Sidney N.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Silveira, Jefferson
Marshall, Joshua A.
Givigi Jr, Sidney N.
author_facet Silveira, Jefferson
Marshall, Joshua A.
Givigi Jr, Sidney N.
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained traction for its success in solving complex tasks for robotic applications. However, its deployment on physical robots remains challenging due to safety risks and the comparatively high costs of training. To avoid these problems, RL agents are often trained on simulators, which introduces a new problem related to the gap between simulation and reality. This paper presents an RL pipeline designed to help reduce the reality gap and facilitate developing and deploying RL policies for real-world robotic systems. The pipeline organizes the RL training process into an initial step for system identification and three training stages: core simulation training, high-fidelity simulation, and real-world deployment, each adding levels of realism to reduce the sim-to-real gap. Each training stage takes an input policy, improves it, and either passes the improved policy to the next stage or loops it back for further improvement. This iterative process continues until the policy achieves the desired performance. The pipeline's effectiveness is shown through a case study with the Boston Dynamics Spot mobile robot used in a surveillance application. The case study presents the steps taken at each pipeline stage to obtain an RL agent to control the robot's position and orientation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_15649
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Simulation Pipeline to Facilitate Real-World Robotic Reinforcement Learning Applications
Silveira, Jefferson
Marshall, Joshua A.
Givigi Jr, Sidney N.
Robotics
Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained traction for its success in solving complex tasks for robotic applications. However, its deployment on physical robots remains challenging due to safety risks and the comparatively high costs of training. To avoid these problems, RL agents are often trained on simulators, which introduces a new problem related to the gap between simulation and reality. This paper presents an RL pipeline designed to help reduce the reality gap and facilitate developing and deploying RL policies for real-world robotic systems. The pipeline organizes the RL training process into an initial step for system identification and three training stages: core simulation training, high-fidelity simulation, and real-world deployment, each adding levels of realism to reduce the sim-to-real gap. Each training stage takes an input policy, improves it, and either passes the improved policy to the next stage or loops it back for further improvement. This iterative process continues until the policy achieves the desired performance. The pipeline's effectiveness is shown through a case study with the Boston Dynamics Spot mobile robot used in a surveillance application. The case study presents the steps taken at each pipeline stage to obtain an RL agent to control the robot's position and orientation.
title A Simulation Pipeline to Facilitate Real-World Robotic Reinforcement Learning Applications
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15649