Our paper, resulting from work of Master student Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto, entitled "Hierarchical Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning with Mid-level Input Generation for Autonomous Driving on Urban Environments" has shown very interesting results:
Both the intermediate mid-level input BEV representation and the control policy are learned as the agent navigates in an urban town (click for more videos from playlist).
In this work we tackle the road sign problem with Reservoir Computing (RC) networks. The T-maze task (a particular form of the road sign problem) consists of a robot in a T-shaped environment that must reach the correct goal (left or right arm of the T-maze) depending on a previously received input sign. It is a control task in which the delay period between the sign received and the required response (e.g., turn right or left) is a crucial factor. Delayed response tasks like this one form a temporal problem that can be handled very well by RC networks. Reservoir Computing is a biologically plausible technique which overcomes the problems of previous algorithms such as Backpropagation Through Time - which exhibits slow (or non-) convergence on training. RC is a new concept that includes a fast and efficient training algorithm. We show that this simple approach can solve the T-maze task efficiently.
Video showing trained RC network controlling the robot:
Publications
Eric Antonelo, Benjamin Schrauwen and Dirk StroobandtMobile Robot Control in the Road Sign Problem using Reservoir Computing Networks Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 911-916 (2008)
Eric Antonelo, Benjamin Schrauwen and Jan Van CampenhoutGenerative Modeling of Autonomous Robots and their Environments using Reservoir Computing Neural Processing Letters, Vol. 26(3), pp. 233-249 (2007)