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Bootstrapping Reinforcement Learning with Imitation for Vision-Based Agile Flight

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arxiv 2403.12203 v3 pith:YNIYBWAH submitted 2024-03-18 cs.RO cs.CVcs.LG

classification cs.ROcs.CVcs.LG
keywords learningpolicyvisualframeworkperformanceagileapproachchallenges
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Learning visuomotor policies for agile quadrotor flight presents significant difficulties, primarily from inefficient policy exploration caused by high-dimensional visual inputs and the need for precise and low-latency control. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach that combines the performance of Reinforcement Learning (RL) and the sample efficiency of Imitation Learning (IL) in the task of vision-based autonomous drone racing. While RL provides a framework for learning high-performance controllers through trial and error, it faces challenges with sample efficiency and computational demands due to the high dimensionality of visual inputs. Conversely, IL efficiently learns from visual expert demonstrations, but it remains limited by the expert's performance and state distribution. To overcome these limitations, our policy learning framework integrates the strengths of both approaches. Our framework contains three phases: training a teacher policy using RL with privileged state information, distilling it into a student policy via IL, and adaptive fine-tuning via RL. Testing in both simulated and real-world scenarios shows our approach can not only learn in scenarios where RL from scratch fails but also outperforms existing IL methods in both robustness and performance, successfully navigating a quadrotor through a race course using only visual information. Videos of the experiments are available at https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/bootstrap-rl-with-il/index.html.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

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  1. VLA-RL: Towards Masterful and General Robotic Manipulation with Scalable Reinforcement Learning

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    A multi-agent SAC controller using a shared voxel-map BEV representation achieves 90.3% simulated corridor success and 100% success across 50 real two-drone indoor trials after A*-based imitation fine-tuning.

  3. Bridging Performance and Generalization in Reinforcement Learning for Agile Flight

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    RL framework for agile drone racing combines task-aware switching and physically informed procedural track generation to achieve 7.4x better zero-shot generalization to unseen tracks while maintaining competitive speeds.

  4. PerchRL: Vision-Based Agile Perching on Inclined Platforms under Rapid and Irregular Motion

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    PerchRL applies two-stage RL with randomized trajectories, temporal augmentation, and visibility-aware rewards to achieve vision-based perching on irregularly moving inclined platforms.

  5. Behavioral Mode Discovery for Fine-tuning Multimodal Generative Policies

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    Unsupervised behavioral mode discovery combined with mutual information rewards enables RL fine-tuning of multimodal generative policies that achieves higher success rates without losing action diversity.

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    SCAL aligns source and target latent features conditioned on system state, reducing target imitation loss to a source loss plus a conditional-KL term, and reports strong sample efficiency in BARC-CARLA.

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