The Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm has been an essential tool for automating robotic tasks. Despite the advances in RL, it is still not widely adopted in the industry due to the need for an expensive large amount of robot interaction with its environment. Curriculum Learning (CL) has been proposed to expedite learning. However, most research works have been only evaluated in simulated environments, from video games to robotic toy tasks. This paper presents a study for accelerating robot learning of contact-rich manipulation tasks based on Curriculum Learning combined with Domain Randomization (DR). We tackle complex industrial assembly tasks with position-controlled robots, such as insertion tasks. We compare different curricula designs and sampling approaches for DR. Based on this study, we propose a method that significantly outperforms previous work, which uses DR only (No CL is used), with less than a fifth of the training time (samples). Results also show that even when training only in simulation with toy tasks, our method can learn policies that can be transferred to the real-world robot. The learned policies achieved success rates of up to 86\% on real-world complex industrial insertion tasks (with tolerances of $\pm 0.01~mm$) not seen during the training.

本研究结合课程学习和域随机化方法，探究如何快速应用于机器人接触式操作任务中，实现在工业装配等领域中的快速学习和短时间内达到高成功率。研究结果表明，本文所提出的方法在工业插入任务中取得了最多86%的成功率，并且使用样本训练的时间不到以往的五分之一。

加速机器人学习接触丰富的操纵：一个课程学习研究