Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning: Challenging Robotics Environments and Request for Research

Matthias Plappert; Marcin Andrychowicz; Alex Ray; Bob McGrew; Bowen Baker; Glenn Powell; Jonas Schneider; Josh Tobin; Maciek Chociej; Peter Welinder; Vikash Kumar; Wojciech Zaremba

Paper

Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning: Challenging Robotics Environments and Request for Research

Abstract

The purpose of this technical report is two-fold. First of all, it introduces a suite of challenging continuous control tasks (integrated with OpenAI Gym) based on currently existing robotics hardware. The tasks include pushing, sliding and pick & place with a Fetch robotic arm as well as in-hand object manipulation with a Shadow Dexterous Hand. All tasks have sparse binary rewards and follow a Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework in which an agent is told what to do using an additional input. The second part of the paper presents a set of concrete research ideas for improving RL algorithms, most of which are related to Multi-Goal RL and Hindsight Experience Replay.