Sim2Real Transfer for Quadrupedal Locomotion

A proposed architecture for learning robust polices for real-world deployment

Abstract

Transferring policies learned in simulation via reinforcement learning (RL) to the real world is a challenging research problem in robotics. In this study, the sim2real transfer method of three papers is examined. In [2], the RL agent learns a robust policy by limiting the observation size and using domain randomization. The sim2real method in [11] learns an adaptive policy conditioned on a latent space that implicitly encodes the physics parameters of its environment. Samples must be collected on the robot to learn a latent space corresponding to the physics of the real world. In [6], the authors also employ a learned latent space, but constrain the mutual information between the latent variables and the input. This ”information bottleneck” prevents the latent space from overfitting to the simulation physics parameters. Finally, I propose using the same information bottleneck approach on policy observations to learn a robust policy more effectively.

Type
Publication
Writeup for Robotics PhD Qualifying Exam, 2021
Jeremiah Coholich
Jeremiah Coholich
Robotics PhD Student

My research interests include deep learning, reinforcement learning, and legged robots.