Hand Reaching Movement Acquired through Reinforcement Learning

This paper shows that a system with two-link arm can obtain hand reaching movement to a target object projected on a visual sensor by reinforcement learning using a layered neural network. The reinforcement signal, which is an only signal from the environment, is given to the system only when the hand reaches the target object. The neural network computes two joint torques from visual sensory signals, joint angles, and joint angular velocities considering the arm dynamics. It is known that the trajectory of the voluntary movement of human hand reaching is almost straight, and the hand velocity changes like bell-shape. Although there are some exceptions, the properties of the trajectories obtained by the reinforcement learning are somewhat similar to the experimental result of the human hand reaching movement.