Learning from Simulation, Racing in Reality

26 Nov 2020  ·  Eugenio Chisari, Alexander Liniger, Alisa Rupenyan, Luc van Gool, John Lygeros ·

We present a reinforcement learning-based solution to autonomously race on a miniature race car platform. We show that a policy that is trained purely in simulation using a relatively simple vehicle model, including model randomization, can be successfully transferred to the real robotic setup. We achieve this by using novel policy output regularization approach and a lifted action space which enables smooth actions but still aggressive race car driving. We show that this regularized policy does outperform the Soft Actor Critic (SAC) baseline method, both in simulation and on the real car, but it is still outperformed by a Model Predictive Controller (MPC) state of the art method. The refinement of the policy with three hours of real-world interaction data allows the reinforcement learning policy to achieve lap times similar to the MPC controller while reducing track constraint violations by 50%.

PDF Abstract

Datasets


Results from the Paper


  Submit results from this paper to get state-of-the-art GitHub badges and help the community compare results to other papers.

Methods