제어 장벽함수를 이용한 안전한 행동 영역 탐색과 제어 매개변수의 실시간 적응

Abstract

One of the most fundamental challenges when designing controllers for dynamic systems is the adjustment of controller parameters. Usually the system model is used to get the initial controller, but eventually the controller parameters must be manually adjusted in the real system to achieve the best performance. To avoid this manual tuning step, data-driven methods such as machine learning were used. Recently, reinforcement learning became one alternative of this problem to be considered as an agent learns policies in large state space with trial-and-error Markov Decision Process (MDP) which is widely used in the field of robotics. However, on initial training step, as an agent tries to explore to the new state space with random action and acts directly on the controller parameters in real systems, MDP can lead the system safety-critical system failures. Therefore, the issue of ‘safe exploration’ became important. In this paper we meet ‘safe exploration’ condition with Control Barrier Function (CBF) which converts direct constraints on the state space to the implicit constraint of the control inputs. Given an initial low-performance controller, it automatically optimizes the parameters of the control law while ensuring safety by the CBF so that the agent can learn how to predict and control unknown and often stochastic environments. Simulation results on a quadrotor UAV indicate that the proposed method can safely optimize controller parameters quickly and automatically.