On Training Flexible Robots using Deep Reinforcement Learning The use of robotics in controlled environments has flourished over the last several decades and training robots to perform tasks using control strategies developed from dynamical models of their hardware have proven very effective. However, in many realworld settings, the uncertainties of the environment, the safety requirements and generalized capabilities that are expected of robots make rigid industrial robots unsuitable. This created great research interest in developing control strategies for flexible robot hardware for which building dynamical models are challenging. In this paper, inspired by the success of deep reinforcement learning (DRL), we systematically study the efficacy of policy search methods using DRL in training flexible robots. Our results indicate that DRL is successfully able to learn efficient and robust policies for complex tasks at various degrees of flexibility. We also note that DRL using Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients can be sensitive to the choice of sensors and adding more informative sensors does not necessarily make the task easier to learn.

Robot Control in Human Environment using Deep Reinforcement Learning and Convolutional Neural Network Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been employed in numerous applications where complex decisionmaking is needed. Robot control in a human environment is an example. Such algorithm offers possibilities to achieve endtoend training which learns from image directly. However, training on a physical robotic system under human environments using DRL is inefficient and even dangerous. Several recent works have used simulators for training models before implementing to physical robots. Although simulation provides efficiency to obtain DRL trained models, it poses challenges for the transformation from simulation to reality. Since a human environment is often cluttered, dynamic and complex, the policy trained with simulation images is not applicable for reality. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a DRL method to achieve endtoend training in simulation, as well as to adapt to reality without any further finetune. Firstly, a Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient algorithm (DDPG) is employed to learn policy for robot control. Secondly, a pretrained Convolutional Neural Network algorithm (CNN) is used to visually track the target in image. This technique provides the efficient and safe DRL training in simulation while offering robust application when a real robot is placed in dynamic human environment. Simulation and experiment are conducted for validation and can be seen in the attached video. The results have shown successful demonstration under various complex environments.