Reinforcement Learning from Real-Robot Interaction without High-Quality State Estimates

A longstanding goal for robot reinforcement learning (RL) is that robots learn from their own physical experience, as humans and animals do. A key obstacle to learning directly from physical experience, especially outside instrumented lab environments, is that the state of the world is usually unobservable to the learner and must be estimated from on-board sensing. Errors in that estimate corrupt both the policy input and potentially the reward signal. We study this challenge using the contact-rich task of a bipedal robot learning to score soccer goals. We estimate all key state variables on-board with an unscented Kalman filter (UKF) and no external instrumentation (e.g., motion capture or overhead cameras). Because the UKF may incorrectly estimate state when the ball is unobserved, we learn a new state representation with a recurrent state-space model (RSSM) that, critically, only corrects the RSSM's latent state when the ball is observed. Building on RLPD, we introduce RSSM-RLPD and apply it to the task of a NAO robot learning to dribble a soccer ball into a goal. We show that the robot learns to score from multiple starting positions after 30 minutes of real-world interaction, reaching 100% success against 0% for a feed-forward policy under the same training budget. We complement our physical robot experiments with a simulation study and show that RSSM-RLPD learns policies that achieve a higher success rate than behavior cloning, a feed-forward, and GRU baseline. Taken together, our results show that the addition of a learned state representation to existing on-robot learning methods enables RL from real-robot data even with a high degree of partial observability.