HILPS: Human-in-Loop Policy Search for Mobile Robot Navigation

Reinforcement learning has obtained increasing attention in mobile robot mapless navigation in recent years. However, there are still some obvious challenges including the sample efficiency, safety due to dilemma of exploration and exploitation. These problems are addressed in this paper by proposing the Human-in-Loop Policy Search (HILPS) framework, where learning from demonstration, learning from human intervention and Near Optimal Policy strategies are integrated together. Firstly, the former two make sure that expert experience grant mobile robot a more informative and correct decision for accomplishing the task and also maintaining the safety of the mobile robot due to the priority of human control. Then the Near Optimal Policy (NOP) provides a way to selectively store the similar experience with respect to the preexisting human demonstration, in which case the sample efficiency can be improved by eliminating exclusively exploratory behaviors. To verify the performance of the algorithm, the mobile robot navigation experiments are extensively conducted in simulation and real world. Results show that HILPS can improve sample efficiency and safety in comparison to state-of-art reinforcement learning.