Title
Learning to Walk Autonomously via Reset-Free Quality-Diversity
Abstract
Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms can discover large and complex behavioural repertoires consisting of both diverse and high-performing skills. However, the generation of behavioural repertoires has mainly been limited to simulation environments instead of real-world learning. This is because existing QD algorithms need large numbers of evaluations as well as episodic resets, which require manual human supervision and intervention. This paper proposes Reset-Free QD (RF-QD) as a step towards autonomous learning for robotics in open-ended environments. We build on Dynamics-Aware QD (DA-QD) and introduce a behaviour selection policy that leverages the diversity of the imagined repertoire and environmental information to intelligently select of behaviours that can act as automatic resets. We demonstrate this through a task of learning to walk within defined training zones with obstacles. Our experiments show that we can learn repertoires of locomotion controllers autonomously without manual resets and with high sample efficiency in spite of harsh safety constraints. Finally, using an ablation of different target objectives, we show that it is important for RF-QD to have diverse types solutions available for the behaviour selection policy over solutions optimised with a specific objective. Videos and code available at https://sites.google.com/view/rf-qd.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3512290.3528715
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2022 GENETIC AND EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION CONFERENCE (GECCO'22)
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
Quality-Diversity, Reset-free, Safety-aware Learning, Robotics
Conference
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bryan Lim100.34
Alexander Reichenbach200.34
Antoine Cully301.01