Repository: stepjam/RLBench
Issue: reopening #50 - End effector delta
Root cause: Documentation Deficiency

Continuation of #50 : 
There are still errors with small delta (0.01). It is also really slow - taking around 2 seconds to find a path. Is this expected behavior?



Hi,
Is this regarding `DELTA_EE_POSE_PLAN` or `DELTA_EE_POSE`? Given that you are saying: "to find a path", I'll assume you are using `DELTA_EE_POSE_PLAN`. This action mode uses path planing, so yes, as with any path planning its going to take longer than simply using the `DELTA_EE_POSE` or `DELTA_EE_VELOCITY`, etc.

Few questions to get down to the problem:
- How are you generating these poses? 
- Are you using both translation and rotation? If yes, then are your quaternion actions valid?

I’m sampling x,y,z each from -1 to 1, and dividing by 100. I then use this as the delta to update.
I’m only changing x,y,z - quaternion i feed in the same from the original pose.

Hi,

> quaternion i feed in the same from the original pos

This is your problem. Remember, you are using the `DELTA` action mode, rather than the `ABS` action mode. So to get a zero rotation you need to pass in a identity quaternion. So what is probably currently happening is that you are giving a rotation that is invalid.

No, I edited in the delta_ee_pose code to set the resulting action to just use the same quaternion without modifyinh

If you've modified the backend then I need to see your changes. Please post the changed lines here

```
arm_action ~ sampled from -1 to 1 each
a_x, a_y, a_z = arm_action/100
x, y, z, qx, qy, qz, qw = self._robot.arm.get_tip().get_pose()
new_pose = [a_x + x, a_y + y, a_z + z] + [qx,qy,qz,qw]
self._path_observations = []
self._path_observations = self._path_action(list(new_pose))
```

Thanks. And how many steps does it run for before you get a (what I assume is) InvalidActionError?

So If i step with [1,1,1,1(gripper)] which is [0.01...] after the division, then I get
```
59, in get_nonlinear_path
    raise ConfigurationPathError('Could not create path.')
pyrep.errors.ConfigurationPathError: Could not create path.
```
on the first step. 
If i step with 0.1 which is [0.001...] after the division, the error occurs on 8th step.

BTW, as an aside, I believe: 
```
self._path_observations = []
self._path_observations = self._path_action(list(new_pose))
```
can just be written as 
`self._path_observations = self._path_action(new_pose)`

Also, did some more digging and the 2 seconds only occurs when it can't find a path, when it does find one it's about 0.2 seconds. 

> So If i step with [1,1,1,1(gripper)] which is [0.01...] after the division, then I get
> 
> ```
> 59, in get_nonlinear_path
>     raise ConfigurationPathError('Could not create path.')
> pyrep.errors.ConfigurationPathError: Could not create path.
> ```
> 
> on the first step.
> If i step with 0.1 which is [0.001...] after the division, the error occurs on 8th step.

This makes sense, right? If you look at the starting configuration of the arm, the end effector cant really increase its z axis anymore without also altering the rotation, and so it will not be able to find a valid configuration. If you were to negate the z axis (which would send the end effector down), then you would find that it would run for longer before getting the error.

> Also, did some more digging and the 2 seconds only occurs when it can't find a path, when it does find one it's about 0.2 seconds.

This is because it keeps trying to find a path/configuration until some max_attempts limit.

Ah, thanks Stephen, makes sense. 

So just to elaborate:
I'm assuming you are doing some RL? if that's the case, then when in this action mode:
- Your random exploration needs to be a little smarter than just random (i.e. accounting for the fact that the robot has a certain configuration space)
- Your agent also needs to be aware of this (i.e. by penalising for suggesting actions outside of this configuration space).

Hope that helps :)

Yeah, I'm trying to set up an env to match [Mujoco's Fetch Reach](https://gym.openai.com/envs/FetchReach-v1/) task to baseline some earlier experiments on RLBench. So, most likely rather than configuring the agent for now I'm trying to adjust the environment to be similar. Thanks again for the help! It'd be great if you could take a look at the stepping speeds in #53 , since without faster speeds we won't be able to use this environment :( 

No probs :+1: 

I'm not sure if this was addressed in other areas, but our project group ran into this issue and got training to run smoothly by manually forcing change in EE position to have a maximum magnitude. [See here for more details. ](https://github.com/Team-Grasp/idl-project/blob/f269fadcfa2275ca9cb9429dd5f6f293ca184960/grasp_env.py#L184)

These errors can still happen though, especially when the model has not converged. We handled two errors separately. ConfigurationPathError implies the desired action (delta EE pos) is too large. InvalidActionError implies the desired actions brings the EE outside its configuration space (ex: literally reaching beyond the arm's max reach). [Please see here for how we handled this. ](https://github.com/Team-Grasp/idl-project/blob/f269fadcfa2275ca9cb9429dd5f6f293ca184960/grasp_env.py#L250)

Hope this helps anyone facing these issues. 

@Alvinosaur Your team's solution seems reasonable!

Did your team have investigated the IK solvers of other RL platform like Pybullet, Robosuite, ... ?

I think addressing these IK errors occurred from explorative Cartesian space 6 DoF actions is a big challenge in robot learning domain...