John B. Lanier

Ashish Kumar, Toby Buckley, John B. Lanier et al.

Success stories of applied machine learning can be traced back to the datasets and environments that were put forward as challenges for the community. The challenge that the community sets as a benchmark is usually the challenge that the community eventually solves. The ultimate challenge of reinforcement learning research is to train real agents to operate in the real environment, but until now there has not been a common real-world RL benchmark. In this work, we present a prototype real-world environment from OffWorld Gym -- a collection of real-world environments for reinforcement learning in robotics with free public remote access. Close integration into existing ecosystem allows the community to start using OffWorld Gym without any prior experience in robotics and takes away the burden of managing a physical robotics system, abstracting it under a familiar API. We introduce a navigation task, where a robot has to reach a visual beacon on an uneven terrain using only the camera input and provide baseline results in both the real environment and the simulated replica. To start training, visit https://gym.offworld.ai

John B. Lanier, Stephen McAleer, Pierre Baldi

Dealing with sparse rewards is a longstanding challenge in reinforcement learning. The recent use of hindsight methods have achieved success on a variety of sparse-reward tasks, but they fail on complex tasks such as stacking multiple blocks with a robot arm in simulation. Curiosity-driven exploration using the prediction error of a learned dynamics model as an intrinsic reward has been shown to be effective for exploring a number of sparse-reward environments. We present a method that combines hindsight with curiosity-driven exploration and curriculum learning in order to solve the challenging sparse-reward block stacking task. We are the first to stack more than two blocks using only sparse reward without human demonstrations.