OPEB: Open physical environment benchmark for artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence methods to solve continuous-control tasks have made significant progress in recent years. However, these algorithms have important limitations and still need significant improvement to be used in industry and real-world applications. This means that this area is still in an active research phase. To involve a large number of research groups, standard benchmarks are needed to evaluate and compare proposed algorithms. In this paper, we propose a physical environment benchmark framework to facilitate collaborative research in this area by enabling different research groups to integrate their designed benchmarks in a unified cloud-based repository and also share their actual implemented benchmarks via the cloud. We demonstrate the proposed framework using an actual implementation of the classical mountain-car example and present the results obtained using a Reinforcement Learning algorithm.