The Crawler, A Class Room Demonstrator for Reinforcement Learning

We present a little crawling robot with a two DOF arm that learns to move forward within about 15 seconds in real time. Due to its small size and weight the robot is ideally suited for classroom demonstrations as well as for talks to the public. Students who want to practice their knowledge about reinforcement learning and value iteration can use a wireless connection to a PC and monitor the internal state of the robot such as the value function or the reward table. Due to its adaptivity, depending on the surface properties of the underground the robot may surprise its audience with unexpected but efficient walking policies. The GUI is open source and the robot hardware is available as a kit from the authors.