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Reinforcement Learning and Apprenticeship Learning for Robotic Control

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Discovery Science (DS 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 4265))

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Abstract

Many control problems, such as autonomous helicopter flight, legged robot locomotion, and autonomous driving are difficult because (i) It is hard to write down, in closed form, a formal specification of the control task (for example, what is the cost function for ”driving well”?), (ii) It is difficult to learn good models of the robot’s dynamics, and (iii) It is expensive to find closed-loop controllers for high dimensional, highly stochastic domains. Using apprenticeship learning—in which we learn from a human demonstration of a task—as a unifying theme, I will present formal results showing how many control problems can be efficiently addressed given access to a demonstration. In presenting these ideas, I will also draw from a number of case studies, including applications in autonomous helicopter flight, quadruped obstacle negotiation, snake robot locomotion, and high-speed off-road navigation.

Finally, I will also describe the application of these ideas to the STAIR (STanford AI Robot) project, which has the long term goal of integrating methods from all major areas of AI—including spoken dialog/NLP, manipulation, vision, navigation, and planning—to build a general-purpose, “intelligent” home/office robotic assistant.

The full version of this paper is published in the Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Algorithmic Learning Theory Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence Vol. 4264.

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Ng, A. (2006). Reinforcement Learning and Apprenticeship Learning for Robotic Control. In: Todorovski, L., Lavrač, N., Jantke, K.P. (eds) Discovery Science. DS 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4265. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11893318_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11893318_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-46491-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-46493-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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