Reinforcement Learning-Based Switching Controller for a Milliscale Robot in a Constrained Environment

Abstract

This work presents a reinforcement learning-based switching control mechanism to autonomously move a ferromagnetic object (representing a milliscale robot) around obstacles within a constrained environment in the presence of disturbances. This mechanism can be used to navigate objects (e.g., capsule endoscopy, swarms of drug particles) through complex environments when active control is a necessity but where direct manipulation can be hazardous. The proposed control scheme consists of a switching control architecture implemented by two sub-controllers. The first sub-controller is designed to employs the robot's inverse kinematic solutions to do an environment search of the to-be-carried ferromagnetic particle while being robust to disturbances. The second sub-controller uses a customized rainbow algorithm to control a robotic arm, i.e., the UR5 robot, to carry a ferromagnetic particle to a desired position through a constrained environment. For the customized Rainbow algorithm, Quantile Huber loss from the Implicit Quantile Networks (IQN) algorithm and ResNet are employed. The proposed controller is first trained and tested in a real-time physics simulation engine (PyBullet). Afterward, the trained controller is transferred to a UR5 robot to remotely transport a ferromagnetic particle in a real-world scenario to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach. The experimental results show an average success rate of 98.86\% calculated over 30 episodes for randomly generated trajectories.