Hardware Efficient Direct Policy Imitation Learning for Robotic Navigation in Resource-Constrained Settings

• Published in: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Switzerland), 2024-01, Vol.24 (1), p.185
• Main Authors: Sumanasena, Vidura, Fernando, Heshan, De Silva, Daswin, Thileepan, Beniel, Pasan, Amila, Samarawickrama, Jayathu, Osipov, Evgeny, Alahakoon, Damminda
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; autonomous navigation; Behavior; Comparative analysis; Decision making; Deep learning; Dependable Communication and Computation Systems; direct policy learning; imitation learning; Kommunikations- och beräkningssystem; mobile robots; Neural networks; Robotics; Robots; Semantics; Simulation; Simulation methods; Vehicles
• ISSN: 1424-8220; 1424-8220
• DOI: 10.3390/s24010185

Direct policy learning (DPL) is a widely used approach in imitation learning for time-efficient and effective convergence when training mobile robots. However, using DPL in real-world applications is not sufficiently explored due to the inherent challenges of mobilizing direct human expertise and the difficulty of measuring comparative performance. Furthermore, autonomous systems are often resource-constrained, thereby limiting the potential application and implementation of highly effective deep learning models. In this work, we present a lightweight DPL-based approach to train mobile robots in navigational tasks. We integrated a safety policy alongside the navigational policy to safeguard the robot and the environment. The approach was evaluated in simulations and real-world settings and compared with recent work in this space. The results of these experiments and the efficient transfer from simulations to real-world settings demonstrate that our approach has improved performance compared to its hardware-intensive counterparts. We show that using the proposed methodology, the training agent achieves closer performance to the expert within the first 15 training iterations in simulation and real-world settings.