aiqbench analysis
This paper addresses a critical gap in deep reinforcement learning by introducing the first comprehensive benchmark for robotic reach-avoid tasks that simulates real-world complexities rather than simplified tabletop environments. By leveraging vectorized simulations with MuJoCo and Brax, the authors demonstrate that agents performing well on easy baselines often fail when scaled to realistic scenarios, highlighting significant challenges remaining before DRL can be considered robustly solved for this problem.
Learning Reach-Avoid Task with Reinforcement Learning: Vectorized Simulation and Benchmark
arXiv:2607.15935v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has a longstanding tradition in addressing the reach-avoid task problem, especially for controlling robotic arms. While this task serves as a baseline environment within the research community, the ability of DRL to effectively learn the each-avoid task in complex and realistic scenarios beyond simplified and restricted tabletop settings remains uncertain. In this paper, we present, for the first time, a comprehensive benchmark for the reachavoid task that accurately captures real-world complexities without simplifications. We demonstrate a diverse range of settings for robotic arm reach-avoid task, which can be used for evaluating DRL research. We achieved this by utilizing the MuJoCo MJX physics engine and parallelizing both the simulation environment and DRL algorithms using the Brax library. We achieved state-of-the-art results with success rates of 96.1% (UR5e) and 98.8% (Franka Emika Robot) for the reach task and 86.8% (UR5e) and 95.2% (Franka) for the static reachavoid task. Our results indicate that while in previous works DRL agents could solve, for example, a reach task in a simplified setting perfectly, their agents performance collapses when evaluated in realistic scenarios. Overall, this work identifies that additional research is still required to claim the successful resolution of the robotic arm reach-avoid task using DRL. The environment and benchmarking code is available as open source at the following link
Abstract:Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has a longstanding tradition in addressing the reach-avoid task problem, especially for controlling robotic arms. While this task serves as a baseline environment within the research community, the ability of DRL to effectively learn the each-avoid task in complex and realistic scenarios beyond simplified and restricted tabletop settings remains uncertain. In this paper, we present, for the first time, a comprehensive benchmark for the reachavoid task that accurately captures real-world complexities without simplifications. We demonstrate a diverse range of settings for robotic arm reach-avoid task, which can be used for evaluating DRL research. We achieved this by utilizing the MuJoCo MJX physics engine and parallelizing both the simulation environment and DRL algorithms using the Brax library. We achieved state-of-the-art results with success rates of 96.1% (UR5e) and 98.8% (Franka Emika Robot) for the reach task and 86.8% (UR5e) and 95.2% (Franka) for the static reachavoid task. Our results indicate that while in previous works DRL agents could solve, for example, a reach task in a simplified setting perfectly, their agents performance collapses when evaluated in realistic scenarios. Overall, this work identifies that additional research is still required to claim the successful resolution of the robotic arm reach-avoid task using DRL. The environment and benchmarking code is available as open source at the following link
Robotics (cs.RO); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2607.15935 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2607.15935v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.15935 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 314 words