Machine Learning Lunch Meeting
Deploying Reinforcement Learning in The Real-Time Domain of Robot Soccer
Event Details
Everyone is invited to the weekly Machine Learning Lunch Meetings held Fridays 12:30-1:30pm. Faculty members from Computer Sciences, Statistics, ECE, and other departments will discuss their latest groundbreaking research in machine learning. This is an opportunity to network with faculty and fellow researchers, and to learn about the cutting-edge research being conducted at our university. Please see https://sites.google.com/view/wiscmllm/home for more information.
Speaker: Josiah Hanna
Abstract: Recent years have seen a surge of interest in reinforcement learning (RL) as a powerful method for enabling AI agents to learn how to act so as to achieve the goals set by their designers. In robotics, RL should be a natural choice for developing high-performing decision-making policies, and yet several challenges prevent its application, especially in complex, real-time, and dynamic environments. In this talk, I will describe my lab’s work on enabling RL in the domain of robot soccer. Specifically, I’ll describe how we use RL within a complete robot behavior architecture and how we train behaviors with sim2real. The approach led to a first place finish in our division of the annual RoboCup competition and represents a first use of deep RL as a major part of the robot’s behavior in the competition.