Bridging the gap between Learning-to-plan, Motion Primitives and Safe Reinforcement Learning

Piotr Kicki1,2, Davide Tateo3, Puze Liu3, Jonas Guenster3, Jan Peters3, Krzysztof Walas1,2

1IDEAS NCBR, Warsaw, Poland
2Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence, Poznan University of Technology, Poland
3Department of Computer Science, Technische Universitat Darmstadt, Germany

Conference on Robot Learning 2024

Zero-shot safe transfer to the real-wrold robotic Air Hockey

Abstract

Trajectory planning under kinodynamic constraints is fundamental for advanced robotics applications that require dexterous, reactive, and rapid skills in complex environments. These constraints, which may represent task, safety, or actuator limitations, are essential for ensuring the proper functioning of robotic platforms and preventing unexpected behaviors. Recent advances in kinodynamic planning demonstrate that learning-to-plan techniques can generate complex and reactive motions under intricate constraints. However, these techniques necessitate the analytical modeling of both the robot and the entire task, a limiting assumption when systems are extremely complex or when constructing accurate task models is prohibitive. This paper addresses this limitation by combining learning-to-plan methods with reinforcement learning, resulting in a novel integration of black-box learning of motion primitives and optimization. We evaluate our approach against state-of-the-art safe reinforcement learning methods, showing that our technique, particularly when exploiting task structure, outperforms baseline methods in challenging scenarios such as planning to hit in robot air hockey. This work demonstrates the potential of our integrated approach to enhance the performance and safety of robots operating under complex kinodynamic constraints.

MY ALT TEXT

Overview of the proposed constrained trajectory generation method

Video Presentation

Experiment videos

BibTeX

@misc{kicki2024bridginggaplearningtoplanmotion,
      title={Bridging the gap between Learning-to-plan, Motion Primitives and Safe Reinforcement Learning}, 
      author={Piotr Kicki and Davide Tateo and Puze Liu and Jonas Guenster and Jan Peters and Krzysztof Walas},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2408.14063},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.RO},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14063}, 
}