Cited by 452Reinforcement Learning in RoboticsAdaptive Dynamic Programming ControlAdvanced Control Systems Optimization

Learning deep control policies for autonomous aerial vehicles with MPC-guided policy search

Open access
Zhang, Tianhao, Kahn, Gregory, Levine, Sergey, Abbeel, Pieter·2016·2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

Abstract

Model predictive control (MPC) is an effective method for controlling robotic systems, particularly autonomous aerial vehicles such as quadcopters. However, application of MPC can be computationally demanding, and typically requires estimating the state of the system, which can be challenging in complex, unstructured environments. Reinforcement learning can in principle forego the need for explicit state estimation and acquire a policy that directly maps sensor readings to actions, but is difficult to apply to unstable systems that are liable to fail catastrophically during training before an effective policy has been found. We propose to combine MPC with reinforcement learning in the framework of guided policy search, where MPC is used to generate data at training time, under full state observations provided by an instrumented training environment. This data is used to train a deep neural network policy, which is allowed to access only the raw observations from the vehicle's onboard sensors. After training, the neural network policy can successfully control the robot without knowledge of the full state, and at a fraction of the computational cost of MPC. We evaluate our method by learning obstacle avoidance policies for a simulated quadrotor, using simulated onboard sensors and no explicit state estimation at test time.

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Crossref · 10.1109/icra.2016.7487175

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  • The frequent sensing and re-planning in MPC allow the robot to react dynamically to changes in the environment while still making more intelligent choices than a purely reactive system.

    “The frequent sensing and re-planning allow the robot to react dynamically to changes in the environment, while still making more intelligent choices than a purely reactive system (Erez et al., 2011; Lenz et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2017; Williams et al., 2017; Gillespie et al., 2018; Amos et al., 2019; Kabzan et al., 2019).”

    From Lessons for Robotics From the Control Architecture of the Octopus (2022) · cites this paper as Zhang et al., 2016

  • FPGAs show great improvements in both performance and power consumption in deep learning applications.

    “AField-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is another viable solution, showing great improvements in both performance and power consumption in deep learning applications.”

    From A survey of deep learning techniques for autonomous driving (2020) · cites this paper as [170]

  • The largest portion of papers in deep learning for self-driving cars are focused mainly on perception and End2End learning.

    “Currently, the largest portion of papers in deep learning for selfdriving cars are focused mainly on perception and End2End learning [81, 124].”

    From A survey of deep learning techniques for autonomous driving (2020) · cites this paper as [124]

  • Real-time requirements have to be fulfilled for processing large amounts of data from the car's sensors suite and for updating parameters of deep learning systems over high-speed communication lines.

    “Finally, realtime requirements have to be fulfilled for processing the large amounts of data gathered from the car's sensors suite, as well as for updating the parameters of deep learning systems over high-speed communication lines [170].”

    From A survey of deep learning techniques for autonomous driving (2020) · cites this paper as [170]

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Authors
Zhang, T., Kahn, G., Levine, S., & Abbeel, P.
Affiliations
University of California, Berkeley (US)
Venue
2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2016-05
Pages
528-535
ISSN
1050-4729 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W1923344279
Cited by
452
References
45
Citations by year
2026: 10 · 2025: 18 · 2024: 37 · 2023: 33 · 2022: 54 · 2021: 53 · 2020: 65 · 2019: 93 · 2018: 42 · 2017: 39 · 2016: 8
FWCI
32.08
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Proceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation/Proceedings (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (N66001)
  • Army Research Office
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Reinforcement Learning in Robotics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computational Theory and Mathematics › Adaptive Dynamic Programming Control
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Control and Systems Engineering › Advanced Control Systems Optimization
Keywords
model predictive control, deep neural network policies, autonomous aerial vehicles, quadrotor control, obstacle avoidance, reinforcement learning, state estimation

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