Safe Real-World Reinforcement Learning for Mobile Agent Obstacle Avoidance

Collision avoidance is key for mobile robots and agents to operate safely in the real world. In this work, we present an efficient and effective collision avoidance system that combines real-world reinforcement learning (RL), search-based online trajectory planning, and automatic emergency intervention, e.g. automatic emergency braking (AEB). The goal of the RL is to learn effective search heuristics that speed up the search for collision-free trajectory and reduce the frequency of triggering automatic emergency interventions. This novel setup enables RL to learn safely and directly on mobile…