ICRA Conference 2020 Conference Paper
DeepRacer: Autonomous Racing Platform for Experimentation with Sim2Real Reinforcement Learning
- Bharathan Balaji
- Sunil Mallya
- Sahika Genc
- Saurabh Gupta
- Leo Dirac
- Vineet Khare
- Gourav Roy
- Tao Sun 0008
DeepRacer is a platform for end-to-end experimentation with RL and can be used to systematically investigate the key challenges in developing intelligent control systems. Using the platform, we demonstrate how a 1/18th scale car can learn to drive autonomously using RL with a monocular camera. It is trained in simulation with no additional tuning in the physical world and demonstrates: 1) formulation and solution of a robust reinforcement learning algorithm, 2) narrowing the reality gap through joint perception and dynamics, 3) distributed on-demand compute architecture for training optimal policies, and 4) a robust evaluation method to identify when to stop training. It is the first successful large-scale deployment of deep reinforcement learning on a robotic control agent that uses only raw camera images as observations and a model-free learning method to perform robust path planning. We open source our code and video demo on GitHub 2.