Overcoming Challenges of Applying Reinforcement Learning for Intelligent Vehicle Control

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a booming area in artificial intelligence. The applications of RL are endless nowadays, ranging from fields such as medicine or finance to manufacturing or the gaming industry. Although multiple works argue that RL can be key to a great part of intelligent vehicle control related problems, there are many practical problems that need to be addressed, such as safety related problems that can result from non-optimal training in RL. For instance, for an RL agent to be effective it should first cover all the situations during training that it may face later. This is often difficult when applied to the real-world. In this work we investigate the impact of RL applied to the context of intelligent vehicle control. We analyse the implications of RL in path planning tasks and we discuss two possible approaches to overcome the gap between the theorical developments of RL and its practical applications. Specifically, firstly this paper discusses the role of Curriculum Learning (CL) to structure the learning process of intelligent vehicle control in a gradual way. The results show how CL can play an important role in training agents in such context. Secondly, we discuss a method of transferring RL policies from simulation to reality in order to make the agent experience situations in simulation, so it knows how to react to them in reality. For that, we use Arduino Yún controlled robots as our platforms. The results enhance the effectiveness of the presented approach and show how RL policies can be transferred from simulation to reality even when the platforms are resource limited.