Simulation-Aided Policy Tuning for Black-Box Robot LearningShow others and affiliations
2025 (English)In: IEEE Transactions on robotics, ISSN 1552-3098, E-ISSN 1941-0468, Vol. 41, p. 2533-2548Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]
How can robots learn and adapt to new tasks and situations with little data? Systematic exploration and simulation are crucial tools for efficient robot learning. We present a novel black-box policy search algorithm focused on data-efficient policy improvements. The algorithm learns directly on the robot and treats simulation as an additional information source to speed up the learning process. At the core of the algorithm, a probabilistic model learns the dependence between the policy parameters and the robot learning objective not only by performing experiments on the robot, but also by leveraging data from a simulator. This substantially reduces interaction time with the robot. Using the model, we can guarantee improvements with high probability for each policy update, thereby facilitating fast, goal-oriented learning. We evaluate our algorithm on simulated fine-tuning tasks and demonstrate the data-efficiency of the proposed dual-information source optimization algorithm. In a real robot learning experiment, we show fast and successful task learning on a robot manipulator with the aid of an imperfect simulator.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2025. Vol. 41, p. 2533-2548
Keywords [en]
Robots, Robot learning, Closed box, Trajectory, Search problems, Optimization, Bayes methods, Tuning, Probabilistic logic, Hardware, Bayesian optimization (BO), sim-to-real
National Category
Robotics and automation Control Engineering Computer Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-555387DOI: 10.1109/TRO.2025.3539192ISI: 001463453000003Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105002557810OAI: oai:DiVA.org:uu-555387DiVA, id: diva2:1954843
2025-04-282025-04-282025-04-28Bibliographically approved