#modelpredictivecontrol

Check out our #ICRA2024 paper "Actor-Critic Model Predictive Control." Model-free #reinforcementlearning (RL) is known for its strong task performance and flexibility in optimizing general reward formulations. On the other hand, #ModelPredictiveControl (MPC) benefits from robustness and online replanning capabilities. We combine both approaches by introducing a new framework called Actor-Critic Model Predictive Control. The key idea is to embed a differentiable MPC within an Actor-Critic RL framework. The proposed approach leverages the short-term predictive optimization capabilities of MPC with the exploratory and end-to-end training properties of RL. The resulting policy effectively manages both short-term decisions through the MPC-based actor and long-term prediction via the critic network, unifying the benefits of both model-based control and end-to-end learning. We validate our method in simulation and the real world with a quadcopter across various high-level tasks. We show that the proposed architecture can achieve real-time control performance, learn complex behaviors via trial and error, and retain the predictive properties of the MPC to better handle out-of-distribution behavior. Paper: Full Video with more details: Kudos to Ángel Romero, Yunlong Song IEEE ICRA University of Zurich UZH Science UZH Space Hub Aerial Core AUTOASSESS European Research Council (ERC)