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research article

A survey on policy search algorithms for learning robot controllers in a handful of trials

Chatzilygeroudis, K.
•
Vassiliades, A.
•
Stulp, F.
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2019
IEEE Transactions on Robotics

Most policy search algorithms require thousands of training episodes to find an effective policy, which is often infeasible with a physical robot. This survey article focuses on the extreme other end of the spectrum: how can a robot adapt with only a handful of trials (a dozen) and a few minutes? By analogy with the word "big-data", we refer to this challenge as "micro-data reinforcement learning". We show that a first strategy is to leverage prior knowledge on the policy structure (e.g., dynamic movement primitives), on the policy parameters (e.g., demonstrations), or on the dynamics (e.g., simulators). A second strategy is to create data-driven surrogate models of the expected reward (e.g., Bayesian optimization) or the dynamical model (e.g., model-based policy search), so that the policy optimizer queries the model instead of the real system. Overall, all successful micro-data algorithms combine these two strategies by varying the kind of model and prior knowledge. The current scientific challenges essentially revolve around scaling up to complex robots (e.g., humanoids), designing generic priors, and optimizing the computing time.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1109/TRO.2019.2958211
ArXiv ID

1807.02303

Author(s)
Chatzilygeroudis, K.
Vassiliades, A.
Stulp, F.
Calinon, S.
Mouret, J. -B.
Date Issued

2019

Published in
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Start page

1

End page

20

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LIDIAP  
Available on Infoscience
February 18, 2020
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/166314
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