Ya-Chu Hsu

Yachu Hsu, Hui Wu, Keyou You et al.

Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has been extensively studied and achieved promising results in a wide range of control tasks. Meanwhile, autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is an important tool for executing complex and challenging underwater tasks. The advances in RL offers ample opportunities for developing intelligent AUVs. This paper provides a selected review on RL based control for AUVs with the focus on applications of RL to low-level control tasks for underwater regulation and tracking. To this end, we first present a concise introduction to the RL based control framework. Then, we provide an overview of RL methods for AUVs control problems, where the main challenges and recent progresses are discussed. Finally, two representative cases of RL-based controllers are given in detail for the model-free RL methods on AUVs.

Wenjie Shi, Shiji Song, Hui Wu et al.

Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been widely used for a range of complex control tasks. However, slow convergence and sample inefficiency remain challenging problems in RL, especially when handling continuous and high-dimensional state spaces. To tackle this problem, we propose a general acceleration method for model-free, off-policy deep RL algorithms by drawing the idea underlying regularized Anderson acceleration (RAA), which is an effective approach to accelerating the solving of fixed point problems with perturbations. Specifically, we first explain how policy iteration can be applied directly with Anderson acceleration. Then we extend RAA to the case of deep RL by introducing a regularization term to control the impact of perturbation induced by function approximation errors. We further propose two strategies, i.e., progressive update and adaptive restart, to enhance the performance. The effectiveness of our method is evaluated on a variety of benchmark tasks, including Atari 2600 and MuJoCo. Experimental results show that our approach substantially improves both the learning speed and final performance of state-of-the-art deep RL algorithms.