Publication
Latent space policy search for robotics
Kevin Sebastian Luck; Gerhard Neumann; Erik Berger; Jan Peters; Heni Ben Amor
In: 2014 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS-2014), September 14-18, Chicago, IL, USA, Pages 1434-1440, IEEE, 2014.
Abstract
Learning motor skills for robots is a hard task. In particular, a high number of degrees-of-freedom in the robot can pose serious challenges to existing reinforcement learning methods, since it leads to a high-dimensional search space. However, complex robots are often intrinsically redundant systems and, therefore, can be controlled using a latent manifold of much smaller dimensionality. In this paper, we present a novel policy search method that performs efficient reinforcement learning by uncovering the low-dimensional latent space of actuator redundancies. In contrast to previous attempts at combining reinforcement learning and dimensionality reduction, our approach does not perform dimensionality reduction as a preprocessing step but naturally combines it with policy search. Our evaluations show that the new approach outperforms existing algorithms for learning motor skills with high-dimensional robots.