Interferobot: aligning an optical interferometer by a reinforcement learning agent
Dmitry Sorokin, Alexander Ulanov, Ekaterina Sazhina, Alexander Lvovsky
Spotlight presentation: Orals & Spotlights Track 09: Reinforcement Learning
on 2020-12-08T07:00:00-08:00 - 2020-12-08T07:10:00-08:00
on 2020-12-08T07:00:00-08:00 - 2020-12-08T07:10:00-08:00
Toggle Abstract Paper (in Proceedings / .pdf)
Abstract: Limitations in acquiring training data restrict potential applications of deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods to the training of real-world robots. Here we train an RL agent to align a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, which is an essential part of many optical experiments, based on images of interference fringes acquired by a monocular camera. The agent is trained in a simulated environment, without any hand-coded features or a priori information about the physics, and subsequently transferred to a physical interferometer. Thanks to a set of domain randomizations simulating uncertainties in physical measurements, the agent successfully aligns this interferometer without any fine-tuning, achieving a performance level of a human expert.