Book Image

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On - Second Edition

By : Maxim Lapan
5 (2)
Book Image

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On - Second Edition

5 (2)
By: Maxim Lapan

Overview of this book

Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On, Second Edition is an updated and expanded version of the bestselling guide to the very latest reinforcement learning (RL) tools and techniques. It provides you with an introduction to the fundamentals of RL, along with the hands-on ability to code intelligent learning agents to perform a range of practical tasks. With six new chapters devoted to a variety of up-to-the-minute developments in RL, including discrete optimization (solving the Rubik's Cube), multi-agent methods, Microsoft's TextWorld environment, advanced exploration techniques, and more, you will come away from this book with a deep understanding of the latest innovations in this emerging field. In addition, you will gain actionable insights into such topic areas as deep Q-networks, policy gradient methods, continuous control problems, and highly scalable, non-gradient methods. You will also discover how to build a real hardware robot trained with RL for less than $100 and solve the Pong environment in just 30 minutes of training using step-by-step code optimization. In short, Deep Reinforcement Learning Hands-On, Second Edition, is your companion to navigating the exciting complexities of RL as it helps you attain experience and knowledge through real-world examples.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
26
Other Books You May Enjoy
27
Index

RL in Robotics

This chapter is a bit unusual in comparison to the other chapters in this book for the following reasons:

  • It took me almost four months to gather all the materials, do the experiments, write the examples, and so on
  • This is the only chapter in which we will try to step beyond emulated environments into the physical world
  • In this chapter, we will build a small robot from accessible and cheap components to be controlled using reinforcement learning (RL) methods

This topic is an amazing and fascinating field for many reasons that couldn't be covered in a whole book, much less in a short chapter. So, this chapter doesn't pretend to offer anywhere close to complete coverage of the robotics field. It is just a short introduction that shows what can be done with commodity components, and outlines future directions for your own experiments and research. In addition, I have to admit that I'm not an expert in robotics and have never worked...