The Promise Of Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning

Last year, Walmart scrapped its ambitious plan to deploy inventory tracking robots. The retail giant has ended its contract with Bossa Nova Robotics citing “different and simpler solutions” could be as effective. This certainly indicates that the much anticipated AI takeover is still a distant dream. Scaling introduces new challenges in robotics or in any domain that tries to automate. In robotics, the reinforcement algorithms that try to guide the robot are spoonfed to do certain tasks in a decent way. But, most of the reinforcement learning applications suffer from lack of robustness. They do fine as long as there are no perturbations in the ecosystem they are deployed in. But, the real world is filled with such uncertainties and one cannot hard code all possible edge cases into a sy