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Continuous-time nonlinear optimal control problems hold great promise in real-world applications. After decades of development, reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved some of the greatest successes as a general nonlinear control design…

We investigate robust model-free reinforcement learning algorithms designed for environments that may be dynamic or even adversarial. Traditional state-based policies often struggle to accommodate the challenges imposed by the presence of…

Reinforcement learning (RL) with continuous time and state/action spaces is often data-intensive and brittle under nuisance variability and shift, motivating methods that exploit value-preserving structures to stabilize and improve…

We present a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that formulates each task in the hierarchy as a special type of Markov decision process for which the Bellman equation is linear and has analytical solution. Problems of this type,…

Controlling high-dimensional stochastic systems, critical in robotics, autonomous vehicles, and hyperchaotic systems, faces the curse of dimensionality, lacks temporal abstraction, and often fails to ensure stochastic stability. To overcome…

Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control is a powerful sampling-based strategy for nonlinear autonomous systems. However, its performance is often bottlenecked by the fidelity of nominal dynamics. We propose ICODE-MPPI, a robust…

An optimal feedback controller for a given Markov decision process (MDP) can in principle be synthesized by value or policy iteration. However, if the system dynamics and the reward function are unknown, a learning agent must discover an…

Learning in MDPs with highly complex state representations is currently possible due to multiple advancements in reinforcement learning algorithm design. However, this incline in complexity, and furthermore the increase in the dimensions of…

A fundamental (and largely open) challenge in sequential decision-making is dealing with non-stationary environments, where exogenous environmental conditions change over time. Such problems are traditionally modeled as non-stationary…

This paper introduces a hybrid algorithm of deep reinforcement learning (RL) and Force-based motion planning (FMP) to solve distributed motion planning problem in dense and dynamic environments. Individually, RL and FMP algorithms each have…

[...] We argue that the traditional grasp modeling theory assumes a complexity that most robotic hands do not possess and is therefore of limited applicability to the robotic hands commonly used today. We discuss these limitations of the…

This paper provides new stability results for Action-Dependent Heuristic Dynamic Programming (ADHDP), using a control algorithm that iteratively improves an internal model of the external world in the autonomous system based on its…

Domain-Independent Dynamic Programming (DIDP) is a state-space search paradigm based on dynamic programming for combinatorial optimization. In its current implementation, DIDP guides the search using user-defined dual bounds. Reinforcement…

We consider un-discounted reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) under temporal drifts, ie, both the reward and state transition distributions are allowed to evolve over time, as long as their respective total…

Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMP) are an established and efficient method for encoding robotic tasks that require adaptation based on reference motions. Typically, the nominal trajectory is obtained through Programming by Demonstration…

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) under the average-reward criterion is essential for long-term decision-making, particularly when the environment may differ from its specification. However, a significant gap exists in understanding the…

Reinforcement learning (RL) in Markov decision processes (MDPs) with large state spaces is a challenging problem. The performance of standard RL algorithms degrades drastically with the dimensionality of state space. However, in practice,…

The growing scale and complexity of safety-critical control systems underscore the need to evolve current control architectures aiming for the unparalleled performances achievable through state-of-the-art optimization and machine learning…

We consider the problem of Reinforcement Learning for nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems. We show that in the RL setting, there is an inherent ``Curse of Variance" in addition to Bellman's infamous ``Curse of Dimensionality", in…

In motion simulation, motion cueing algorithms are used for the trajectory planning of the motion simulator platform, where workspace limitations prevent direct reproduction of reference trajectories. Strategies such as motion washout,…