Shared Control of Holonomic Wheelchairs through Reinforcement Learning

Smart electric wheelchairs can improve user experience by supporting the driver with shared control. State-of-the-art work showed the potential of shared control in improving safety in navigation for non-holonomic robots. However, for holonomic systems, current approaches often lead to unintuitive behavior for the user and fail to utilize the full potential of omnidirectional driving. Therefore, we propose a reinforcement learning-based method, which takes a 2D user input and outputs a 3D motion while ensuring user comfort and reducing cognitive load on the driver. Our approach is trained in Isaac Gym and tested in simulation in Gazebo. We compare different RL agent architectures and reward functions based on metrics considering cognitive load and user comfort. We show that our method ensures collision-free navigation while smartly orienting the wheelchair and showing better or competitive smoothness compared to a previous non-learning-based method. We further perform a sim-to-real transfer and demonstrate, to the best of our knowledge, the first real-world implementation of RL-based shared control for an omnidirectional mobility platform.

Sim-to-Real Transfer for Mobile Robots with Reinforcement Learning: from NVIDIA Isaac Sim to Gazebo and Real ROS 2 Robots

Unprecedented agility and dexterous manipulation have been demonstrated with controllers based on deep reinforcement learning (RL), with a significant impact on legged and humanoid robots. Modern tooling and simulation platforms, such as NVIDIA Isaac Sim, have been enabling such advances. This article focuses on demonstrating the applications of Isaac in local planning and obstacle avoidance as one of the most fundamental ways in which a mobile robot interacts with its environments. Although there is extensive research on proprioception-based RL policies, the article highlights less standardized and reproducible approaches to exteroception. At the same time, the article aims to provide a base framework for end-to-end local navigation policies and how a custom robot can be trained in such simulation environment. We benchmark end-to-end policies with the state-of-the-art Nav2, navigation stack in Robot Operating System (ROS). We also cover the sim-to-real transfer process by demonstrating zero-shot transferability of policies trained in the Isaac simulator to real-world robots. This is further evidenced by the tests with different simulated robots, which show the generalization of the learned policy. Finally, the benchmarks demonstrate comparable performance to Nav2, opening the door to quick deployment of state-of-the-art end-to-end local planners for custom robot platforms, but importantly furthering the possibilities by expanding the state and action spaces or task definitions for more complex missions. Overall, with this article we introduce the most important steps, and aspects to consider, in deploying RL policies for local path planning and obstacle avoidance with Isaac Sim training, Gazebo testing, and ROS 2 for real-time inference in real robots. The code is available at https://github.com/sahars93/RL-Navigation.