Little Robots Learn to Drive Fast in the Real World

Without a lifetime of experience to build on like humans have (and totally take for granted), robots that want to learn a new skill often have to start from scratch. Reinforcement learning is a technique that lets robots learn new skills through trial and error, but especially in the case of learning end-to-end vision based control policies, it takes a lot of time because the real world is a weirdly-lit friction-filled obstacle-y mess that robots can’t understand without a frequently impractical amount of effort.

Roboticists at UC Berkeley have vastly sped up this process by doing the…