End-to-End Deep Imitation Learning: Robot Soccer Case Study
This is an incremental improvement for robotics, specifically in robot soccer, using existing methods on new data.
The paper tackled teaching a robot to dribble a ball to a goal using imitation learning with deep convolutional networks, resulting in the robot scoring 4 goals out of 20 test episodes but struggling with goal alignment.
In imitation learning, behavior learning is generally done using the features extracted from the demonstration data. Recent deep learning algorithms enable the development of machine learning methods that can get high dimensional data as an input. In this work, we use imitation learning to teach the robot to dribble the ball to the goal. We use B-Human robot software to collect demonstration data and a deep convolutional network to represent the policies. We use top and bottom camera images of the robot as input and speed commands as outputs. The CNN policy learns the mapping between the series of images and speed commands. In 3D realistic robotics simulator experiments, we show that the robot is able to learn to search the ball and dribble the ball, but it struggles to align to the goal. The best-proposed policy model learns to score 4 goals out of 20 test episodes.