RL in Robotics

This chapter is a bit unusual in comparison to the other chapters in this book for the following reasons:

• It took me almost four months to gather all the materials, do the experiments, write the examples, and so on
• This is the only chapter in which we will try to step beyond emulated environments into the physical world
• In this chapter, we will build a small robot from accessible and cheap components to be controlled using reinforcement learning (RL) methods

This topic is an amazing and fascinating field for many reasons that couldn't be covered in a whole book, much less in a short chapter. So, this chapter doesn't pretend to offer anywhere close to complete coverage of the robotics field. It is just a short introduction that shows what can be done with commodity components, and outlines future directions for your own experiments and research. In addition, I have to admit that I'm not an expert in robotics and have never worked...