MPC-Net: A First Principles Guided Policy Search


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Date

2020-04

Publication Type

Journal Article

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

Altmetric

Data

Abstract

We present an Imitation Learning approach for the control of dynamical systems with a known model. Our policy search method is guided by solutions from MPC. Typical policy search methods of this kind minimize a distance metric between the guiding demonstrations and the learned policy. Our loss function, however, corresponds to the minimization of the control Hamiltonian, which derives from the principle of optimality. Therefore, our algorithm directly attempts to solve the optimality conditions with a parameterized class of control laws. Additionally, the proposed loss function explicitly encodes the constraints of the optimal control problem and we provide numerical evidence that its minimization achieves improved constraint satisfaction. We train a mixture-of-expert neural network architecture for controlling a quadrupedal robot and show that this policy structure is well suited for such multimodal systems. The learned policy can successfully stabilize different gaits on the real walking robot from less than 10 min of demonstration data.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

Volume

5 (2)

Pages / Article No.

2897 - 2904

Publisher

IEEE

Event

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Learning from Demonstration; Legged Robots; Optimization and Optimal Control

Organisational unit

09570 - Hutter, Marco / Hutter, Marco check_circle

Notes

Funding

166232 - Data-driven control approaches for advanced legged locomotion (SNF)
188596 - Perceptive Dynamic Locomotion on Rough Terrain (SNF)
780883 - subTerranean Haptic INvestiGator (EC)

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