Reward Shaping for a Reinforcement Learning Method-Based Navigation Framework

Applying Reinforcement Learning in everyday applications and varied environments has proved the potential of the of the field and revealed pitfalls along the way. In robotics, a learning agent takes over gradually the control of a robot by abstracting the navigation model of the robot with its inputs and outputs, thus reducing the human intervention. The challenge for the agent is how to implement a feedback function that facilitates the learning process of an MDP problem in an environment while reducing the time of convergence for the method. In this paper we will implement a reward shaping system avoiding sparse rewards which gives fewer data for the learning agent in a ROS environment. Reward shaping prioritizes behaviours that brings the robot closer to the goal by giving intermediate rewards and helps the algorithm converge quickly. We will use a pseudocode implementation as an illustration of the method.