The next IPAB Workshop will take place on Thursday 29th July 2021 at 1pm via Blackboard Collaborate. Joao Pousa De Moura and Chenyang Zhao will be speaking.
The link can be found in the corresponding email.
Speaker: Joao Pousa De Moura
Title: Non-prehensile Manipulation with Non-Linear MPC
Abstract: Manipulating objects without fully grasping them, known as non-prehensile manipulation, can be quite challenging due to the complex nature of the contact interaction between the robot and the manipulated object.
Recently, I have started studying this type of contact interactions, with special emphasis on sliding contacts, and in this talk I will go through a case study of how to plan and control the motion of a planar object using a non-linear Model Predictive Controller (MPC).
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Speaker: Chenyang Zhao
Title: Robust Domain Randomised Reinforcement Learning through Peer-to-Peer Distillation
Abstract: In reinforcement learning, domain randomisation is a popular technique for learning general policies that are robust to new environments and domain-shifts at deployment. However, naively aggregating information from randomised domains may lead to high variance in gradient estimation and an unstable learning process. To address this issue, we present a peer-to-peer online distillation strategy for reinforcement learning termed P2PDRL, where multiple learning agents are each assigned to a different environment, and then exchange knowledge through mutual regularisation based on Kullback-Leibler divergence. Our experiments on continuous control tasks show that P2PDRL enables robust learning across a wider randomisation distribution than baselines, and more robust generalisation to new environments at testing.