Using Data-Driven Domain Randomization to Transfer Robust Control Policies to Mobile Robots

This work develops a technique for using robot motion trajectories to create a high quality stochastic dynamics model that is then leveraged in simulation to train control policies with associated performance guarantees. We demonstrate the idea by collecting dynamics data from a 1/5 scale agile ground vehicle, fitting a stochastic dynamics model, and training a policy in simulation to drive around an oval track at up to 6.5 m/s while avoiding obstacles. We show that the control policy can be transferred back to the real vehicle with little loss in predicted performance. We compare this to an approach that uses a simple analytic car model to train a policy in simulation and show that using a model with stochasticity learned from data leads to higher performance in terms of trajectory tracking accuracy and collision probability. Furthermore, we show empirically that simulation-derived performance guarantees transfer to the actual vehicle when executing a policy optimized using a deep stochastic dynamics model fit to vehicle data.