Project 2: Continuous Control

Introduction

This project trains an agent to act in the Tennis environment. In this environment, a double-jointed arm can move to target locations. A reward of +0.1 is provided for each step that the agent's hand is in the goal location. Thus, the goal of your agent is to maintain its position at the target location for as many time steps as possible.

Environment

In this environment, two agents control rackets to bounce a ball over a net. If an agent hits the ball over the net, it receives a reward of +0.1. If an agent lets a ball hit the ground or hits the ball out of bounds, it receives a reward of -0.01. Thus, the goal of each agent is to keep the ball in play.

The observation space consists of 8 variables corresponding to the position and velocity of the ball and racket. Each agent receives its own, local observation. Two continuous actions are available, corresponding to movement toward (or away from) the net, and jumping.

The task is episodic, and in order to solve the environment, the agents must get an average score of +0.5 (over 100 consecutive episodes, after taking the maximum over both agents). Specifically,

• After each episode, we add up the rewards that each agent received (without discounting), to get a score for each agent. This yields 2 (potentially different) scores. We then take the maximum of these 2 scores.
• This yields a single score for each episode.

The environment is considered solved, when the average (over 100 episodes) of those scores is at least +0.5.

Getting Started

1. Follow the instructions in the DRLND GitHub repository to set up your Python environment

2. Download the environment from one of the links below. You need only select the environment that matches your operating system:

   • Linux: click here
   • Mac OSX: click here
   • Windows (32-bit): click here
   • Windows (64-bit): click here

   (For Windows users) Check out this link if you need help with determining if your computer is running a 32-bit version or 64-bit version of the Windows operating system.

   (For AWS) If you'd like to train the agent on AWS (and have not enabled a virtual screen), then please use this link to obtain the "headless" version of the environment. You will not be able to watch the agent without enabling a virtual screen, but you will be able to train the agent. (To watch the agent, you should follow the instructions to enable a virtual screen, and then download the environment for the Linux operating system above.)

3. Place the file in the DRLND GitHub repository, in the p3_collab-compet/ folder, and unzip (or decompress) the file.

4. (Optional) Run DDPGTrainer.py to train the agent

5. Use the Report.ipynb notebook to visualize the results