Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Conference
ASME 2006 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference
Publication Date
9-2006
DOI
10.1115/DETC2006-99651
City
Philadelphia, PN
Abstract
Intelligent agents are becoming increasingly important in our society in applications as diverse as house cleaning robots, computer-controlled opponents in video games, unmanned aerial combat vehicles, entertainment robots, and autonomous explorers in outer space. However, the broader adoption of intelligent agents is often hindered by their limited adaptability to new tasks; when conditions change slightly, agents may quickly become confused. Additionally, a substantial engineering effort is required to design an agent for each new task. This paper presents an adaptable, general purpose intelligent agent toolkit based on reinforcement learning (RL), an approach with strong mathematical foundations and intriguing biological implications. RL algorithms are powerful because of their generality: agents simply receive a scalar reward value representing success or failure, which greatly simplifies the agent design process. Furthermore, these algorithms can be combined with other techniques (e.g., planning from a learned internal model) to improve learning efficiency. The design and implementation of an open source RL toolkit is presented here as a step towards the goal of general purpose agents. Experimental results show learning performance on several tasks, including two physical control problems.
Copyright Owner
ASME
Copyright Date
2006
Language
en
Recommended Citation
Streeter, Tyler; Oliver, James H.; and Sannier, Adrian, "Verve: A General Purpose Open Source Reinforcement Learning Toolkit" (2006). Mechanical Engineering Conference Presentations, Papers, and Proceedings. 106.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/me_conf/106
Included in
Computer-Aided Engineering and Design Commons, Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons
Comments
This is a conference proceeding from ASME 2006 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference 1 (2006): 359, doi:10.1115/DETC2006-99651. Posted with permission.