DRL Based Intelligent Joint Manipulator and Viewing Camera Control for Reaching Tasks and Environments with Obstacles and Occluders

This work studies joint camera and robotic manipulator control for reaching tasks in complex environments with obstacles and occluders. We obviate the conventional challenges involved in complex perception, planning, and control modules and careful calibration for sensing and actuation and seek a solution leveraging deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Our method using DRL and deep Q-learning learns a policy for robot actuation and perception control, mapping directly raw image pixels inputs into camera motion and manipulator joint control actions outputs. We show results comparing different training approaches, and demonstrating competency for increasingly complex situations and degrees of freedom. These preliminary experiments suggest the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach.