Safety Augmented Value Estimation From Demonstrations (SAVED): Safe Deep Model-Based RL for Sparse Cost Robotic Tasks

Reinforcement learning (RL) for robotics is challenging due to the difficulty in hand-engineering a dense cost function, which can lead to unintended behavior, and dynamical uncertainty, which makes exploration and constraint satisfaction challenging. We address these issues with a new model-based reinforcement learning algorithm, Safety Augmented Value Estimation from Demonstrations (SAVED), which uses supervision that only identifies task completion and a modest set of suboptimal demonstrations to constrain exploration and learn efficiently while handling complex constraints. We then compare SAVED with 3 state-of-the-art model-based and model-free RL algorithms on 6 standard simulation benchmarks involving navigation and manipulation and a physical knot-tying task on the da Vinci surgical robot. Results suggest that SAVED outperforms prior methods in terms of success rate, constraint satisfaction, and sample efficiency, making it feasible to safely learn a control policy directly on a real robot in less than an hour. For tasks on the robot, baselines succeed less than <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{5}\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> of the time while SAVED has a success rate of over <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text{75}\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> in the first 50 training iterations. Code and supplementary material is available at <uri>https://tinyurl.com/saved-rl</uri>.