Robotic Manipulation with Reinforcement Learning, State Representation Learning, and Imitation Learning (Student Abstract)

Humans possess the advanced ability to grab, hold, and manipulate objects with dexterous hands. What about robots? Can they interact with the surrounding world intelligently to achieve certain goals (e.g., grasping, object-relocation)? Actually, robotic manipulation is central to achieving the premise of robotics and represents immense potential to be widely applied in various scenarios like industries, hospitals, and homes. In this work, we aim to address multiple robotic manipulation tasks like grasping, button-pushing, and door-opening with reinforcement learning (RL), state representation learning (SRL), and imitation learning. For diverse missions, we self-built the PyBullet or MuJoCo simulated environments and independently explored three different learning-style methods to successfully solve such tasks: (1) Normal reinforcement learning methods; (2) Combined state representation learning (SRL) and RL approaches; (3) Imitation learning bootstrapped RL algorithms.