Bellmans Principle of Optimality in Deep Reinforcement Learning for Time-Varying Tasks

A novel decentralized reinforcement learning robust optimal tracking control theory for time varying constrained reconfigurable modular robots based on action-critic-identifier (ACI) and state-action value function (Q-function) has been presented to solve the problem of the continuous time nonlinear optimal control policy for strongly coupled uncertainty robotic system. The dynamics of time varying constrained reconfigurable modular robot is described as a synthesis of interconnected subsystem, and continuous time state equation andQ-function have been designed in this paper. Combining with ACI and RBF network, the global uncertainty of the subsystem and the HJB (Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman) equation have been estimated, where critic-NN and action-NN are used to approximate the optimalQ-function and the optimal control policy, and the identifier is adopted to identify the global uncertainty as well as RBF-NN which is used to update the weights of ACI-NN. On this basis, a novel decentralized robust optimal tracking controller of the subsystem is proposed, so that the subsystem can track the desired trajectory and the tracking error can converge to zero in a finite time. The stability of ACI and the robust optimal tracking controller are confirmed by Lyapunov theory. Finally, comparative simulation examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed ACI and decentralized control theory.

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Model-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning with Time-Varying State and Control Constraints: An Application to Intelligent Vehicles

10.36227/techrxiv.17205740.v2 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Xinglong Zhang ◽

Yaoqian Peng ◽

Biao Luo ◽

Wei Pan ◽

Xin Xu ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Optimal Control ◽

Reinforcement Learning ◽

Control Policy ◽

Intelligent Vehicles ◽

Time Varying ◽

Control Constraints ◽

Model Based ◽

Safety Constraints ◽

And Control ◽

State And Control Constraints

<div>Recently, barrier function-based safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence guarantees. Also, few works have addressed the safe RL algorithm design under time-varying safety constraints. This paper proposes a model-based safe RL algorithm for optimal control of nonlinear systems with time-varying state and control constraints. In the proposed approach, we construct a novel barrier-based control policy structure that can guarantee control safety. A multi-step policy evaluation mechanism is proposed to predict the policy's safety risk under time-varying safety constraints and guide the policy to update safely. Theoretical results on stability and robustness are proven. Also, the convergence of the actor-critic learning algorithm is analyzed. The performance of the proposed algorithm outperforms several state-of-the-art RL algorithms in the simulated Safety Gym environment. Furthermore, the approach is applied to the integrated path following and collision avoidance problem for two real-world intelligent vehicles. A differential-drive vehicle and an Ackermann-drive one are used to verify the offline deployment performance and the online learning performance, respectively. Our approach shows an impressive sim-to-real transfer capability and a satisfactory online control performance in the experiment.</div>

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