5,886 research outputs found
Episodic Learning with Control Lyapunov Functions for Uncertain Robotic Systems
Many modern nonlinear control methods aim to endow systems with guaranteed
properties, such as stability or safety, and have been successfully applied to
the domain of robotics. However, model uncertainty remains a persistent
challenge, weakening theoretical guarantees and causing implementation failures
on physical systems. This paper develops a machine learning framework centered
around Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs) to adapt to parametric uncertainty and
unmodeled dynamics in general robotic systems. Our proposed method proceeds by
iteratively updating estimates of Lyapunov function derivatives and improving
controllers, ultimately yielding a stabilizing quadratic program model-based
controller. We validate our approach on a planar Segway simulation,
demonstrating substantial performance improvements by iteratively refining on a
base model-free controller
Parameter estimation in softmax decision-making models with linear objective functions
With an eye towards human-centered automation, we contribute to the
development of a systematic means to infer features of human decision-making
from behavioral data. Motivated by the common use of softmax selection in
models of human decision-making, we study the maximum likelihood parameter
estimation problem for softmax decision-making models with linear objective
functions. We present conditions under which the likelihood function is convex.
These allow us to provide sufficient conditions for convergence of the
resulting maximum likelihood estimator and to construct its asymptotic
distribution. In the case of models with nonlinear objective functions, we show
how the estimator can be applied by linearizing about a nominal parameter
value. We apply the estimator to fit the stochastic UCL (Upper Credible Limit)
model of human decision-making to human subject data. We show statistically
significant differences in behavior across related, but distinct, tasks.Comment: In pres
Multi-Parametric Extremum Seeking-based Auto-Tuning for Robust Input-Output Linearization Control
We study in this paper the problem of iterative feedback gains tuning for a
class of nonlinear systems. We consider Input-Output linearizable nonlinear
systems with additive uncertainties. We first design a nominal Input-Output
linearization-based controller that ensures global uniform boundedness of the
output tracking error dynamics. Then, we complement the robust controller with
a model-free multi-parametric extremum seeking (MES) control to iteratively
auto-tune the feedback gains. We analyze the stability of the whole controller,
i.e. robust nonlinear controller plus model-free learning algorithm. We use
numerical tests to demonstrate the performance of this method on a mechatronics
example.Comment: To appear at the IEEE CDC 201
Control Regularization for Reduced Variance Reinforcement Learning
Dealing with high variance is a significant challenge in model-free
reinforcement learning (RL). Existing methods are unreliable, exhibiting high
variance in performance from run to run using different initializations/seeds.
Focusing on problems arising in continuous control, we propose a functional
regularization approach to augmenting model-free RL. In particular, we
regularize the behavior of the deep policy to be similar to a policy prior,
i.e., we regularize in function space. We show that functional regularization
yields a bias-variance trade-off, and propose an adaptive tuning strategy to
optimize this trade-off. When the policy prior has control-theoretic stability
guarantees, we further show that this regularization approximately preserves
those stability guarantees throughout learning. We validate our approach
empirically on a range of settings, and demonstrate significantly reduced
variance, guaranteed dynamic stability, and more efficient learning than deep
RL alone.Comment: Appearing in ICML 201
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