Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new user$H_infty$ Model-free Reinforcement Learning with Robust Stability Guarantee
86
0
0.0
(
0
)
Added by
Wei Pan
Publication date
2019
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
Reinforcement learning is showing great potentials in robotics applications, including autonomous driving, robot manipulation and locomotion. However, with complex uncertainties in the real-world environment, it is difficult to guarantee the successful generalization and sim-to-real transfer of learned policies theoretically. In this paper, we introduce and extend the idea of robust stability and $H_infty$ control to design policies with both stability and robustness guarantee. Specifically, a sample-based approach for analyzing the Lyapunov stability and performance robustness of a learning-based control system is proposed. Based on the theoretical results, a maximum entropy algorithm is developed for searching Lyapunov function and designing a policy with provable robust stability guarantee. Without any specific domain knowledge, our method can find a policy that is robust to various uncertainties and generalizes well to different test environments. In our experiments, we show that our method achieves better robustness to both large impulsive disturbances and parametric variations in the environment than the state-of-art results in both robust and generic RL, as well as classic control. Anonymous code is available to reproduce the experimental results at https://github.com/RobustStabilityGuaranteeRL/RobustStabilityGuaranteeRL.
rate research
Read More
Reinforcement Learning (RL) and its integration with deep learning have achieved impressive performance in various robotic control tasks, ranging from motion planning and navigation to end-to-end visual manipulation. However, stability is not guaranteed in model-free RL by solely using data. From a control-theoretic perspective, stability is the most important property for any control system, since it is closely related to safety, robustness, and reliability of robotic systems. In this paper, we propose an actor-critic RL framework for control which can guarantee closed-loop stability by employing the classic Lyapunovs method in control theory. First of all, a data-based stability theorem is proposed for stochastic nonlinear systems modeled by Markov decision process. Then we show that the stability condition could be exploited as the critic in the actor-critic RL to learn a controller/policy. At last, the effectiveness of our approach is evaluated on several well-known 3-dimensional robot control tasks and a synthetic biology gene network tracking task in three different popular physics simulation platforms. As an empirical evaluation on the advantage of stability, we show that the learned policies can enable the systems to recover to the equilibrium or way-points when interfered by uncertainties such as system parametric variations and external disturbances to a certain extent.
We propose a model-free algorithm for learning efficient policies capable of returning table tennis balls by controlling robot joints at a rate of 100Hz. We demonstrate that evolutionary search (ES) methods acting on CNN-based policy architectures for non-visual inputs and convolving across time learn compact controllers leading to smooth motions. Furthermore, we show that with appropriately tuned curriculum learning on the task and rewards, policies are capable of developing multi-modal styles, specifically forehand and backhand stroke, whilst achieving 80% return rate on a wide range of ball throws. We observe that multi-modality does not require any architectural priors, such as multi-head architectures or hierarchical policies.
Although deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) methods have lots of strengths that are favorable if applied to autonomous driving, real deep RL applications in autonomous driving have been slowed down by the modeling gap between the source (training) domain and the target (deployment) domain. Unlike current policy transfer approaches, which generally limit to the usage of uninterpretable neural network representations as the transferred features, we propose to transfer concrete kinematic quantities in autonomous driving. The proposed robust-control-based (RC) generic transfer architecture, which we call RL-RC, incorporates a transferable hierarchical RL trajectory planner and a robust tracking controller based on disturbance observer (DOB). The deep RL policies trained with known nominal dynamics model are transfered directly to the target domain, DOB-based robust tracking control is applied to tackle the modeling gap including the vehicle dynamics errors and the external disturbances such as side forces. We provide simulations validating the capability of the proposed method to achieve zero-shot transfer across multiple driving scenarios such as lane keeping, lane changing and obstacle avoidance.
Safety is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) applied in the real world. Adding chance constraints (or probabilistic constraints) is a suitable way to enhance RL safety under uncertainty. Existing chance-constrained RL methods like the penalty methods and the Lagrangian methods either exhibit periodic oscillations or learn an over-conservative or unsafe policy. In this paper, we address these shortcomings by proposing a separated proportional-integral Lagrangian (SPIL) algorithm. We first review the constrained policy optimization process from a feedback control perspective, which regards the penalty weight as the control input and the safe probability as the control output. Based on this, the penalty method is formulated as a proportional controller, and the Lagrangian method is formulated as an integral controller. We then unify them and present a proportional-integral Lagrangian method to get both their merits, with an integral separation technique to limit the integral value in a reasonable range. To accelerate training, the gradient of safe probability is computed in a model-based manner. We demonstrate our method can reduce the oscillations and conservatism of RL policy in a car-following simulation. To prove its practicality, we also apply our method to a real-world mobile robot navigation task, where our robot successfully avoids a moving obstacle with highly uncertain or even aggressive behaviors.
While conventional reinforcement learning focuses on designing agents that can perform one task, meta-learning aims, instead, to solve the problem of designing agents that can generalize to different tasks (e.g., environments, obstacles, and goals) that were not considered during the design or the training of these agents. In this spirit, in this paper, we consider the problem of training a provably safe Neural Network (NN) controller for uncertain nonlinear dynamical systems that can generalize to new tasks that were not present in the training data while preserving strong safety guarantees. Our approach is to learn a set of NN controllers during the training phase. When the task becomes available at runtime, our framework will carefully select a subset of these NN controllers and compose them to form the final NN controller. Critical to our approach is the ability to compute a finite-state abstraction of the nonlinear dynamical system. This abstract model captures the behavior of the closed-loop system under all possible NN weights, and is used to train the NNs and compose them when the task becomes available. We provide theoretical guarantees that govern the correctness of the resulting NN. We evaluated our approach on the problem of controlling a wheeled robot in cluttered environments that were not present in the training data.
suggested questions
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
