  Although reinforcement learning methods can achieve impressive results in
simulation, the real world presents two major challenges: generating samples is
exceedingly expensive, and unexpected perturbations or unseen situations cause
proficient but specialized policies to fail at test time. Given that it is
impractical to train separate policies to accommodate all situations the agent
may see in the real world, this work proposes to learn how to quickly and
effectively adapt online to new tasks. To enable sample-efficient learning, we
consider learning online adaptation in the context of model-based reinforcement
learning. Our approach uses meta-learning to train a dynamics model prior such
that, when combined with recent data, this prior can be rapidly adapted to the
local context. Our experiments demonstrate online adaptation for continuous
control tasks on both simulated and real-world agents. We first show simulated
agents adapting their behavior online to novel terrains, crippled body parts,
and highly-dynamic environments. We also illustrate the importance of
incorporating online adaptation into autonomous agents that operate in the real
world by applying our method to a real dynamic legged millirobot. We
demonstrate the agent's learned ability to quickly adapt online to a missing
leg, adjust to novel terrains and slopes, account for miscalibration or errors
in pose estimation, and compensate for pulling payloads.
