Visual Navigation in Real-World Indoor Environments Using End-to-End Deep Reinforcement Learning

Visual navigation is essential for many applications in robotics, from manipulation, through mobile robotics to automated driving. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) provides an elegant map-free approach integrating image processing, localization, and planning in one module, which can be trained and therefore optimized for a given environment....

Viewpoint optimization for aiding grasp synthesis algorithms using reinforcement learning

Grasp synthesis for unknown objects is a challenging problem as the algorithms are expected to cope with missing object shape information. This missing information is a function of the vision sensor viewpoint. The majority of the grasp synthesis algorithms in literature synthesize a grasp by using one single image of the target object and...

Preference-driven demonstrations ranking for inverse reinforcement learning

New flexible teaching methods for robotics are needed to automate repetitive tasks that are currently still done by humans. For limited batch sizes, it is too expensive to teach a robot a new task (Smith & Anderson, 2014). Ideally, such flexible robots can be taught a new task by a non-expert. A non-expert is a person who knows the task the...

Reinforcement Learning for Tracking Control in Robotics

For a robot manipulator, an accurate reference tracking capability is one of the most important performance factor. This is especially the case for a robot which is deployed for an industrial use such as welding and laser cutting. Recently, an emerging application of 3D printing also attracts researchers to use robotic manipulators in hope of...

Reinforcement Learning on autonomous humanoid robots

Service robots have the potential to be of great value in households, health care and other labor intensive environments. However, these environments are typically unique, not very structured and frequently changing, which makes it difficult to make service robots robust and versatile through manual programming. Having robots learn to solve...