Whole-body control of a mobile manipulator using end-to-end reinforcement learning

J Kindle, F Furrer, T Novkovic, JJ Chung… - arXiv preprint arXiv …, 2020 - arxiv.org
arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.02637, 2020arxiv.org
Mobile manipulation is usually achieved by sequentially executing base and manipulator
movements. This simplification, however, leads to a loss in efficiency and in some cases a
reduction of workspace size. Even though different methods have been proposed to solve
Whole-Body Control (WBC) online, they are either limited by a kinematic model or do not
allow for reactive, online obstacle avoidance. In order to overcome these drawbacks, in this
work, we propose an end-to-end Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach to WBC. We …
Mobile manipulation is usually achieved by sequentially executing base and manipulator movements. This simplification, however, leads to a loss in efficiency and in some cases a reduction of workspace size. Even though different methods have been proposed to solve Whole-Body Control (WBC) online, they are either limited by a kinematic model or do not allow for reactive, online obstacle avoidance. In order to overcome these drawbacks, in this work, we propose an end-to-end Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach to WBC. We compared our learned controller against a state-of-the-art sampling-based method in simulation and achieved faster overall mission times. In addition, we validated the learned policy on our mobile manipulator RoyalPanda in challenging narrow corridor environments.
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