Replace the failing ODE-rolled mecanum chassis dynamics with a
Supervisor.setVelocity call that uses the gym mecanum forward
kinematics formula directly. Wheel motors still spin (visual);
chassis motion comes from the gym model so training and deployment
match by construction.
Results (seed=42, n=10 sheep): BC + RL mecanum pen 10/10 in both
field and field_round. n=5 mecanum cells still 0/5 due to tracker
phantoms anchored to wall corners under the 360° LiDAR — documented
in docs/status.md as the remaining gap.
Cleanup: drop deploy-time hacks (HERDING_HEADING_*, HERDING_OMEGA_CLAMP,
HERDING_TRACKER_*) that were workarounds for the old ODE chaos;
revert the proto inertiaMatrix, roller dampingConstant, and reduced
motor torque since they no longer carry load; refresh comments
around the mecanum config presets.
Repo hygiene pass after a long working session.
Files removed:
* stage1_train.log — runtime training log (~125 KB), shouldn't have
been tracked.
* training/bc/demos.npz — orphan default-name demos file from before
the world+drive-suffixed naming convention took over; no script
references it.
* training/runs/bc_dagger{1,2}_differential_field/policy.zip — failed
DAgger experiment artifacts. Per `memory/dagger_results.md` the
whole DAgger experiment hit 0/5 on Webots transfer; these checkpoints
have no consumers.
Untracked-but-deleted (no git change) — also cleaned from disk:
* Root-level runtime logs (43 *.log files, all unused — gitignored now).
* training/bc/{combined,dagger}*.npz (5 huge demo blobs, 2.6 GB
reclaimed; not committed).
* training/bc/v1/ (2.6 GB backup of pre-DAgger demos; reclaimed).
* training/runs/at_20260426_*/ (orphan timestamped runs; reclaimed).
* All __pycache__/.
Dead code removed:
* `herding/control/strombom.py::compute_action_debug` — no callers
anywhere in the repo.
* `herding/control/sequential.py::compute_action_debug` — same.
* `herding/control/universal.py::compute_action_diff` — same.
.gitignore extended to cover:
* All *.log files (training/eval/webots logs are runtime artifacts).
* training/bc/*.npz (re-collectable on demand by `make bc_demos`).
* training/bc/v1/.
* .pytest_cache, *.pyc, .claude/.
README refreshed:
* Mecanum + round-world coverage in the headline.
* Quick-start updated for DRIVE/WORLD-suffixed Makefile targets,
GT-bypass example, and the mecanum-retrain caveat.
* Layout reflects the actual current tree (config.py, both protos,
both worlds, all tools).
* Results table replaced with the Webots end-to-end numbers from
the 2026-05-16 sweep (8/8 diff combos + LiDAR/GT comparison).
Verification: 126 pytest cases still pass (was 126 going in — no
test-coverage regression from the dead-code removal).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Adds RecurrentPPO-based training as an alternative to MLP+frame-stack.
The LSTM gives the policy unbounded temporal memory, addressing the
partial-obs failure mode of the 140° Webots LiDAR (tracker briefly
empties when the dog turns; sporadic phantom tracks confuse decisions).
* training/rl/train_lstm.py: from-scratch RecurrentPPO trainer (no BC
init, no KL term since there's no reference). Uses HERDING_WEBOTS
preset so the obs distribution matches deployment.
* training/eval.py: auto-detects RecurrentPPO zips, maintains LSTM
hidden state across steps, resets between episodes.
* controllers/shepherd_dog/policy_loader.py: PolicyHandle supports
recurrent policies — state managed inside, reset_recurrent() exposed.
Result on diff/field after 3M steps:
- Gym (default 360°): 69% avg success across n=1..10
- Gym (HERDING_WEBOTS preset, training env): 2% — penning 3-4/5 but
rarely all 5
- Webots LiDAR 140°: 0/5 (same wall as DAgger and v1 policies)
Conclusion: architectural changes (LSTM vs MLP) don't close the
perception sim-to-real gap. The gym LiDAR sim doesn't faithfully
reproduce Webots phantom-track distribution; any policy trained on the
gym proxy fails to handle real Webots phantoms regardless of
architecture. Closing this gap requires either modeling Webots phantom
patterns in the gym sim (multi-day work) or Webots-in-the-loop
training (very slow). See memory/lstm_results.md for details.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Today's session worked across the full Webots delivery stack — found and
fixed a cluster of bugs blocking the BC/RL transfer, then explored
training-side mitigations for the residual perception gap.
Bug fixes:
- Makefile FP_RATE default 2.0 → 0.0: BC demos used fp_rate=0 but RL
fine-tune defaulted to fp_rate=2, poisoning the BC obs distribution
and stalling PPO at 0% success across 1.46M+ steps.
- controllers/{shepherd_dog,sheep}/runtime.ini: Webots was launching
controllers under system python3 (no numpy) and they were crashing
silently. Pinned to the conda tir env.
- herding/config.py HERDING_WEBOTS preset: pen_latch_depth 0.5 → 2.0,
max_new_tracks_per_step 3 → 1, static_reject 0.8 → 1.2. Stops phantom
FPs near the gate from latching as permanently-penned tracks.
- herding/perception/sheep_tracker.py: penned tracks now decay at
forget_steps × 8 instead of living forever. Adds get_positions
min_freshness filter for deploy-time use.
Training/eval matches deployment:
- training/bc/collect.py: --dagger-policy flag for DAgger rollouts
(policy drives, teacher labels) + --use-webots-preset for matched
140° tracker + DR config.
- controllers/shepherd_dog/shepherd_dog.py: scan-fallback (0, 0.6) when
BC/RL sees empty sheep_positions — recovers from FOV gaps.
Tooling:
- tools/dagger_round.sh: one-shot DAgger round (collect + concat + bc).
- tools/webots_sweep_gt.sh: full sweep with HERDING_USE_GT=1 for the
perception-gap diagnosis matrix.
- protos/ShepherdDog360.proto: 360° FOV variant for the FOV-ablation
comparison. Canonical proto stays at 140° per project spec.
Artifacts: v1 BC/RL policies for all 4 (drive × world) combos trained
in clean gym (success: diff/field 90-100%, diff/round 58%, mec/field
60-100%, mec/round 50-100%). DAgger r1/r2 BCs for diff/field show
12%→38% progression on gym HERDING_WEBOTS proxy but did not close
to actual Webots LiDAR (0/5 throughout). Next: LSTM policy or
learned tracker per the project-state memory.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Johnny Fernandes