Authors: Zinan Liu,Kai Ploeger,Svenja Stark,Elmar Rueckert,Jan Peters
ArXiv: 1904.12336
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Abstract URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1904.12336v1
In quadruped gait learning, policy search methods that scale high dimensional
continuous action spaces are commonly used. In most approaches, it is necessary
to introduce prior knowledge on the gaits to limit the highly non-convex search
space of the policies. In this work, we propose a new approach to encode the
symmetry properties of the desired gaits, on the initial covariance of the
Gaussian search distribution, allowing for strategic exploration. Using
episode-based likelihood ratio policy gradient and relative entropy policy
search, we learned the gaits walk and trot on a simulated quadruped. Comparing
these gaits to random gaits learned by initialized diagonal covariance matrix,
we show that the performance can be significantly enhanced.