Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Arm Control with Limited Environment Interaction

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been applied to robotic arm control, which enables the agent to learn an effective policy to solve complex tasks. However, it requires constant interaction with the environment leading to low sample efficiency. In this paper, we propose a robotic arm control approach based on planning via lookahead search, which is a model-based RL algorithm to improve the sample efficiency. The approach builds an environment model in order to obtain the dynamics of the environment. Thus the model can be used to plan future actions by a tree-based search. The experiments show that our approach can solve the task of robotic arm control with less environmental samples.