Navigation Among Movable Obstacles with learned dynamic constraints

Abstract

In this paper we present the first planner for the problem of Navigation Among Movable Obstacles (NAMO) on a real robot that can handle environments with under-specified object dynamics. This result makes use of recent progress from two threads of the Reinforcement Learning literature. The first is a hierarchical Markov-Decision Process formulation of the NAMO problem designed to handle dynamics uncertainty. The second is a physics-based Reinforcement Learning framework which offers a way to ground this uncertainty in a compact model space that can be efficiently updated from data received by the robot online. Our results demonstrate the ability of a robot to adapt to unexpected object behavior in a real office scenario.