Towards advanced robotic manipulation

Robotic manipulation and control has increased in importance in recent years. However, state of the art techniques still have limitations when required to operate in real world applications. This paper explores Hindsight Experience Replay both in simulated and real environments, highlighting its weaknesses and proposing reinforcement-learning based alternatives based on reward and goal shaping. Additionally, several research questions are identified along with potential research directions that could be explored to tackle those questions.