Contextual Imagined Goals for Self-Supervised Robotic Learning

Understand

While reinforcement learning provides an appealing formalism for learning individual skills, a general-purpose robotic system must be able to master an extensive repertoire of behaviors.

• Instead of learning a large collection of skills individually, can we instead enable a robot to propose and practice its own behaviors automatically, learning about the affordances and behaviors that it can perform in its environment, such that it can then repurpose this knowledge once a new task is commanded by the user? In this paper, we study this question in the context of self-supervised goal-conditioned reinforcement learning.
• A central challenge in this learning regime is the problem of goal setting: in order to practice useful skills, the robot must be able to autonomously set goals that are feasible but diverse.
• When the robot's environment and available objects vary, as they do in most open-world settings, the robot must propose to itself only those goals that it can accomplish in its present setting with the objects that are at hand.