Check out our latest work, "Actor-Critic Model Predictive Control: Differentiable Optimization meets Reinforcement Learning for Agile Flight," published in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, where we reconcile #OptimalControl and #ReinforcementLearning, achieving the same super-human performance, but with superior generalizability, as our previous model-free deep RL! Code released! PDF: Code:... Full Video: Model-free #ReinforcementLearning (RL) is known for its strong task performance and flexibility in optimizing general reward formulations. On the other hand, #ModelPredictiveControl (MPC) provides robustness, constraint handling, and powerful online replanning capabilities. In this work, we extend our previous AC-MPC paper (Romero, ICRA'24) by taking a deeper look at how both approaches can be unified. We introduce and extend Actor-Critic Model Predictive Control (AC-MPC), a framework that embeds a differentiable MPC inside an Actor-Critic RL architecture. This integration allows the MPC-based actor to perform short-term predictive optimization, while the critic facilitates long-horizon learning and exploration. We conduct a comprehensive study that highlights AC-MPC’s key advantages: - Better out-of-distribution generalization, both against unknown disturbances and changes in the quadrotor dynamics - Improved sample efficiency - A novel empirical analysis uncovering a relationship between the critic’s value function and the MPC cost function, providing deeper insight into their interplay. We validate our method in simulation and the real world on a quadcopter flying at superhuman speeds of up to 21 m/s, matching state-of-the-art model-free RL performance, and retaining the predictive structure of MPC for more reliable out-of-distribution behavior. Reference: Actor-Critic Model Predictive Control: Differentiable Optimization meets Reinforcement Learning for Agile Flight IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), 2025 PDF: Full Video: Code: Kudos to Ángel Romero, Elie Aljalbout, Yunlong Song! University of Zurich UZH Science UZH Space Hub AUTOASSESS European Research Council (ERC) UZHaishow more

Davide Scaramuzza

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