Fully Autonomous Real-World Reinforcement Learning with Applications to Mobile Manipulation

Abstract

We study how robots can autonomously learn skills that require a combination of navigation and grasping. Learning robotic skills in the real world remains challenging without large scale data collection and supervision. Our aim is to devise a robotic reinforcement learning system for learning navigation and manipulation together, in an autonomous way without human intervention, enabling continual learning under realistic assumptions. Specifically, our system, ReLMM, can learn continuously on a real-world platform without any environment instrumentation, without human intervention, and without access to privileged information, such as maps, objects positions, or a global view of the environment. Our method employs a modularized policy with components for manipulation and navigation, where uncertainty over the manipulation success drives exploration for the navigation controller, and the manipulation module provides rewards for navigation. We evaluate our method on a room cleanup task, where the robot must navigate to and pick up items of scattered on the floor. After a grasp curriculum training phase, ReLMM can learn navigation and grasping together fully automatically, in around 40 hours of real-world training.