# Accelerated Sim-to-Real Deep Reinforcement Learning: Learning Collision Avoidance from Human Player

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.10711 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.10711/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Leveraging Demonstrations for Deep Reinforcement Learning on Robotics Problems with Sparse Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08817/) (2017)
- [Crowd-Robot Interaction: Crowd-aware Robot Navigation with Attention-based Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08835/) (2018)
- [Socially Aware Motion Planning with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08862/) (2017)
- [Motion Planning Among Dynamic, Decision-Making Agents with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01956/) (2018)
- [Virtual-to-real Deep Reinforcement Learning: Continuous Control of Mobile Robots for Mapless Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00420/) (2017)
- [Towards Optimally Decentralized Multi-Robot Collision Avoidance via Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10082/) (2017)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning with Successor Features for Navigation across Similar Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05533/) (2016)
- [Learning Deep Control Policies for Autonomous Aerial Vehicles with MPC-Guided Policy Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.06791/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Towards Deviation-Robust Agent Navigation via Perturbation-Aware Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05770/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a sensor-level mapless collision avoidance algorithm for use in mobile robots that map raw sensor data to linear and angular velocities and navigate in an unknown environment without a map. An efficient training strategy is proposed to allow a robot to learn from both human experience data and self-exploratory data. A game format simulation framework is designed to allow the human player to tele-operate the mobile robot to a goal and human action is also scored using the reward function. Both human player data and self-playing data are sampled using prioritized experience replay algorithm. The proposed algorithm and training strategy have been evaluated in two different experimental configurations: textitEnvironment 1, a simulated cluttered environment, and textitEnvironment 2, a simulated corridor environment, to investigate the performance. It was demonstrated that the proposed method achieved the same level of reward using only 16% of the training steps required by the standard Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) method in Environment 1 and 20% of that in Environment 2. In the evaluation of 20 random missions, the proposed method achieved no collision in less than 2~h and 2.5~h of training time in the two Gazebo environments respectively. The method also generated smoother trajectories than DDPG. The proposed method has also been implemented on a real robot in the real-world environment for performance evaluation. We can confirm that the trained model with the simulation software can be directly applied into the real-world scenario without further fine-tuning, further demonstrating its higher robustness than DDPG. The video and code are available: https://youtu.be/BmwxevgsdGc https://github.com/hanlinniu/turtlebot3ddpgcollisionavoidance