$ cat projects/warehouse-rl.md
mode: explore· University at Buffalo· Spring 2025reward: unknown

A warehouse robot environment, solved with Q-learning and SARSA

A 2D grid world I designed from scratch: a robot picks up objects and delivers them around obstacles, in deterministic and stochastic versions, then tabular RL learns to do it.

RLGymnasiumQ-learningSARSA

## What it is

  • ›Building the environment, not just the agent: observation and action spaces, reward shaping for pickup and delivery, obstacles, and a stochastic variant where actions sometimes slip.
  • ›Q-learning and SARSA with a sweep over discount factor and epsilon decay, so the difference between the two algorithms shows up in the plots rather than being asserted. A bonus multi-pickup version reaches about 215 average reward over a thousand episodes.

## Why it is here

This is where the theme of this site comes from. Watching epsilon decay change what the agent found was the first time explore versus exploit felt like a real decision rather than a formula.