CycleRL: Sim-to-Real Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robust Autonomous Bicycle Control
This addresses robust control for autonomous bicycles in urban mobility, offering improved adaptability over traditional methods, though it is incremental as it applies existing DRL techniques to a new domain.
The paper tackled autonomous bicycle control by developing CycleRL, a sim-to-real deep reinforcement learning framework, achieving a 99.90% balance success rate and low tracking errors in simulation with successful hardware transfer.
Autonomous bicycles offer a promising agile solution for urban mobility and last-mile logistics, however, conventional control strategies often struggle with their underactuated nonlinear dynamics, suffering from sensitivity to model mismatches and limited adaptability to real-world uncertainties. To address this, this paper presents CycleRL, the first sim-to-real deep reinforcement learning framework designed for robust autonomous bicycle control. Our approach trains an end-to-end neural control policy within the high-fidelity NVIDIA Isaac Sim environment, leveraging Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) to circumvent the need for an explicit dynamics model. The framework features a composite reward function tailored for concurrent balance maintenance, velocity tracking, and steering control. Crucially, systematic domain randomization is employed to bridge the simulation-to-reality gap and facilitate direct transfer. In simulation, CycleRL achieves considerable performance, including a 99.90% balance success rate, a low steering tracking error of 1.15°, and a velocity tracking error of 0.18 m/s. These quantitative results, coupled with successful hardware transfer, validate DRL as an effective paradigm for autonomous bicycle control, offering superior adaptability over traditional methods. Video demonstrations are available at https://anony6f05.github.io/CycleRL/.