Bendikas, Rokas; Modugno, Valerio; Kanoulas, Dimitrios; Vasconcelos, Francisco; Stoyanov, Danail; (2023) Learning Needle Pick-And-Place without expert demonstrations. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 10.1109/lra.2023.3266720. (In press).

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Abstract

We introduce a novel approach for learning a complex multi-stage needle pick-and-place manipulation task for surgical applications using Reinforcement Learning without expert demonstrations or explicit curriculum. The proposed method is based on a recursive decomposition of the original task into a sequence of sub-tasks with increasing complexity and utilizes an actor-critic algorithm with deterministic policy output. In this work, exploratory bottlenecks have been used by a human expert as convenient boundary points for partitioning complex tasks into simpler subunits. Our method has successfully learnt a policy for the needle pick-and-place task, whereas the state-of-the-art TD3+HER method is unable to achieve success without the help of expert demonstrations. Comparison results show that our method achieves the highest performance with a 91% average success rate.

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