  Learning-based approaches often outperform hand-coded algorithmic solutions
for many problems in robotics. However, learning long-horizon tasks on real
robot hardware can be intractable, and transferring a learned policy from
simulation to reality is still extremely challenging. We present a novel
approach to model-free reinforcement learning that can leverage existing
sub-optimal solutions as an algorithmic prior during training and deployment.
During training, our gated fusion approach enables the prior to guide the
initial stages of exploration, increasing sample-efficiency and enabling
learning from sparse long-horizon reward signals. Importantly, the policy can
learn to improve beyond the performance of the sub-optimal prior since the
prior's influence is annealed gradually. During deployment, the policy's
uncertainty provides a reliable strategy for transferring a simulation-trained
policy to the real world by falling back to the prior controller in uncertain
states. We show the efficacy of our Multiplicative Controller Fusion approach
on the task of robot navigation and demonstrate safe transfer from simulation
to the real world without any fine-tuning. The code for this project is made
publicly available at https://sites.google.com/view/mcf-nav/home

Robotics;Artificial Intelligence