Title
Complex Robotic Manipulation via Graph-Based Hindsight Goal Generation
Abstract
Reinforcement learning algorithms, such as hindsight experience replay (HER) and hindsight goal generation (HGG), have been able to solve challenging robotic manipulation tasks in multigoal settings with sparse rewards. HER achieves its training success through hindsight replays of past experience with heuristic goals but underperforms in challenging tasks in which goals are difficult to explore. HGG enhances HER by selecting intermediate goals that are easy to achieve in the short term and promising to lead to target goals in the long term. This guided exploration makes HGG applicable to tasks in which target goals are far away from the object’s initial position. However, the vanilla HGG is not applicable to manipulation tasks with obstacles because the Euclidean metric used for HGG is not an accurate distance metric in such an environment. Although, with the guidance of a handcrafted distance grid, grid-based HGG can solve manipulation tasks with obstacles, a more feasible method that can solve such tasks automatically is still in demand. In this article, we propose graph-based hindsight goal generation (G-HGG), an extension of HGG selecting hindsight goals based on shortest distances in an obstacle-avoiding graph, which is a discrete representation of the environment. We evaluated G-HGG on four challenging manipulation tasks with obstacles, where significant enhancements in both sample efficiency and overall success rate are shown over HGG and HER. Videos can be viewed at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://videoviewsite.wixsite.com/ghgg</uri> .
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/TNNLS.2021.3088947
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Hindsight experience replay (HER),path planning,reinforcement learning (RL),robotic arm manipulation
Journal
33
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
12
2162-237X
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
15
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhenshan Bing1175.51
Matthias Brucker200.34
Fabrice O Morin300.34
Rui Li400.34
Xiaojie Su5185172.94
Kai Huang646845.69
Alois Knoll Knoll71700271.32