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Section: New Software and Platforms

Explauto

an autonomous exploration library

Keyword: Exploration

Scientific Description: An important challenge in developmental robotics is how robots can be intrinsically motivated to learn efficiently parametrized policies to solve parametrized multi-task reinforcement learning problems, i.e. learn the mappings between the actions and the problem they solve, or sensory effects they produce. This can be a robot learning how arm movements make physical objects move, or how movements of a virtual vocal tract modulates vocalization sounds. The way the robot will collects its own sensorimotor experience have a strong impact on learning efficiency because for most robotic systems the involved spaces are high dimensional, the mapping between them is non-linear and redundant, and there is limited time allowed for learning. If robots explore the world in an unorganized manner, e.g. randomly, learning algorithms will be often ineffective because very sparse data points will be collected. Data are precious due to the high dimensionality and the limited time, whereas data are not equally useful due to non-linearity and redundancy. This is why learning has to be guided using efficient exploration strategies, allowing the robot to actively drive its own interaction with the environment in order to gather maximally informative data to optimize the parametrized policies. In the recent year, work in developmental learning has explored various families of algorithmic principles which allow the efficient guiding of learning and exploration.

Explauto is a framework developed to study, model and simulate curiosity-driven learning and exploration in real and simulated robotic agents. Explauto’s scientific roots trace back from Intelligent Adaptive Curiosity algorithmic architecture [127], which has been extended to a more general family of autonomous exploration architectures by [1] and recently expressed as a compact and unified formalism [119]. The library is detailed in [120]. In Explauto, interest models are implementing the strategies of active selection of particular problems / goals in a parametrized multi-task reinforcement learning setup to efficiently learn parametrized policies. The agent can have different available strategies, parametrized problems, models, sources of information, or learning mechanisms (for instance imitate by mimicking vs by emulation, or asking help to one teacher or to another), and chooses between them in order to optimize learning (a processus called strategic learning [124]). Given a set of parametrized problems, a particular exploration strategy is to randomly draw goals/ RL problems to solve in the motor or problem space. More efficient strategies are based on the active choice of learning experiments that maximize learning progress using bandit algorithms, e.g. maximizing improvement of predictions or of competences to solve RL problems [127]. This automatically drives the system to explore and learn first easy skills, and then explore skills of progressively increasing complexity. Both random and learning progress strategies can act either on the motor or on the problem space, resulting in motor babbling or goal babbling strategies.

  • Motor babbling consists in sampling commands in the motor space according to a given strategy (random or learning progress), predicting the expected effect, executing the command through the environment and observing the actual effect. Both the parametrized policies and interest models are finally updated according to this experience.

  • Goal babbling consists in sampling goals in the problem space and to use the current policies to infer a motor action supposed to solve the problem (inverse prediction). The robot/agent then executes the command through the environment and observes the actual effect. Both the parametrized policies and interest models are finally updated according to this experience.It has been shown that this second strategy allows a progressive solving of problems much more uniformly in the problem space than with a motor babbling strategy, where the agent samples directly in the motor space [1].

 

Figure 1. Complex parametrized policies involve high dimensional action and effect spaces. For the sake of visualization, the motor M and sensory S spaces are only 2D each in this example. The relationship between M and S is non-linear, dividing the sensorimotor space into regions of unequal stability: small regions of S can be reached very precisely by large regions of M, or large regions in S can be very sensitive to variations in M.: s as well as a non-linear and redundant relationship. This non-linearity can imply redundancy, where the same sensory effect can be attained using distinct regions in M.
IMG/explStratIllustr2D.png

Functional Description: This library provides high-level API for an easy definition of:

  • Real and simulated robotic setups (Environment level),

  • Incremental learning of parametrized policies (Sensorimotor level),

  • Active selection of parametrized RL problems (Interest level).

The library comes with several built-in environments. Two of them corresponds to simulated environments: a multi-DoF arm acting on a 2D plan, and an under-actuated torque-controlled pendulum. The third one allows to control real robots based on Dynamixel actuators using the Pypot library. Learning parametrized policies involves machine learning algorithms, which are typically regression algorithms to learn forward models, from motor controllers to sensory effects, and optimization algorithms to learn inverse models, from sensory effects, or problems, to the motor programs allowing to reach them. We call these sensorimotor learning algorithms sensorimotor models. The library comes with several built-in sensorimotor models: simple nearest-neighbor look-up, non-parametric models combining classical regressions and optimization algorithms, online mixtures of Gaussians, and discrete Lidstone distributions. Explauto sensorimotor models are online learning algorithms, i.e. they are trained iteratively during the interaction of the robot in theenvironment in which it evolves. Explauto provides also a unified interface to define exploration strategies using the InterestModel class. The library comes with two built-in interest models: random sampling as well as sampling maximizing the learning progress in forward or inverse predictions.

Explauto environments now handle actions depending on a current context, as for instance in an environment where a robotic arm is trying to catch a ball: the arm trajectories will depend on the current position of the ball (context). Also, if the dynamic of the environment is changing over time, a new sensorimotor model (Non-Stationary Nearest Neighbor) is able to cope with those changes by taking more into account recent experiences. Those new features are explained in Jupyter notebooks.

This library has been used in many experiments including:

  • the control of a 2D simulated arm,

  • the exploration of the inverse kinematics of a poppy humanoid (both on the real robot and on the simulated version),

  • acoustic model of a vocal tract.

Explauto is crossed-platform and has been tested on Linux, Windows and Mac OS. It has been released under the GPLv3 license.