English

Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning for Quadrotors

Robotics 2024-12-18 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown great effectiveness in quadrotor control, enabling specialized policies to develop even human-champion-level performance in single-task scenarios. However, these specialized policies often struggle with novel tasks, requiring a complete retraining of the policy from scratch. To address this limitation, this paper presents a novel multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL) framework tailored for quadrotor control, leveraging the shared physical dynamics of the platform to enhance sample efficiency and task performance. By employing a multi-critic architecture and shared task encoders, our framework facilitates knowledge transfer across tasks, enabling a single policy to execute diverse maneuvers, including high-speed stabilization, velocity tracking, and autonomous racing. Our experimental results, validated both in simulation and real-world scenarios, demonstrate that our framework outperforms baseline approaches in terms of sample efficiency and overall task performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.12442,
  title  = {Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning for Quadrotors},
  author = {Jiaxu Xing and Ismail Geles and Yunlong Song and Elie Aljalbout and Davide Scaramuzza},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.12442},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:38:06.912Z