The ingredients of real world robotic reinforcement learning

Robots have been useful in environments that can be carefully controlled, such as those commonly found in industrial settings (e.g. assembly lines). However, in unstructured settings like the home, we need robotic systems that are adaptive to the diversity of the real world. Learning-based algorithms have the potential to enable robots to acquire complex behaviors adaptively in unstructured environments, by leveraging data collected from the environment. In particular, with reinforcement learning, robots learn novel behaviors through trial and error interactions. This is particularly important as we deploy robots in scenarios where the environment may not be known.