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Motion planning failures during autonomous navigation often occur when safety constraints are either too conservative, leading to deadlocks, or too liberal, resulting in collisions. To improve robustness, a robot must dynamically adapt its…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Nicholas Mohammad , Nicola Bezzo

We propose Scheduled Auxiliary Control (SAC-X), a new learning paradigm in the context of Reinforcement Learning (RL). SAC-X enables learning of complex behaviors - from scratch - in the presence of multiple sparse reward signals. To this…

Object insertion under tight tolerances ($< \hspace{-.02in} 1mm$) is an important but challenging assembly task as even small errors can result in undesirable contacts. Recent efforts focused on Reinforcement Learning (RL), which often…

This paper proposes a simulation-based reinforcement learning algorithm for controlling systems with uncertain and varying system parameters. While simulators are useful for safely learning control policies, the reality gap remains a major…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-14 Junya Ikemoto

Model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers an attractive approach to learn control policies for high-dimensional systems, but its relatively poor sample complexity often forces training in simulated environments. Even in simulation,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Boris Ivanovic , James Harrison , Apoorva Sharma , Mo Chen , Marco Pavone

We investigate the important problem of certifying stability of reinforcement learning policies when interconnected with nonlinear dynamical systems. We show that by regulating the input-output gradients of policies, strong guarantees of…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Ming Jin , Javad Lavaei

The deployment of robots in uncontrolled environments requires them to operate robustly under previously unseen scenarios, like irregular terrain and wind conditions. Unfortunately, while rigorous safety frameworks from robust optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Kai-Chieh Hsu , Duy Phuong Nguyen , Jaime Fernández Fisac

This paper proposes a safety modulator actor-critic (SMAC) method to address safety constraint and overestimation mitigation in model-free safe reinforcement learning (RL). A safety modulator is developed to satisfy safety constraints by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Qihan Qi , Xinsong Yang , Gang Xia , Daniel W. C. Ho , Pengyang Tang

The two-time scale nature of SAC, which is an actor-critic algorithm, is characterised by the fact that the critic estimate has not converged for the actor at any given time, but since the critic learns faster than the actor, it ensures…

Planetary exploration requires traversal in environments with rugged terrains. In addition, Mars rovers and other planetary exploration robots often carry sensitive scientific experiments and components onboard, which must be protected from…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great potential in complex control tasks, particularly when combined with deep neural networks within the Actor-Critic (AC) framework. However, in practical applications, balancing exploration, learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Zhiwei Shang , Xinyi Yuan , Wenjun Huang , Yunduan Cui , Di Chen , Meixin Zhu

We present a deep reinforcement learning framework based on Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) for safe and precise maneuvering of double-Ackermann-steering mobile robots (DASMRs). Unlike holonomic or simpler non-holonomic robots such as…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Kohio Deflesselle , Mélodie Daniel , Aly Magassouba , Miguel Aranda , Olivier Ly

This paper develops a reinforcement learning-based controller for the stabilization of partial differential equation (PDE) systems. Within the soft actor-critic (SAC) framework, we embed a DeepONet, a well-known neural operator (NO), which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-13 Chenchen Wang , Jie Qi , Jiaqi Hu

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) is one of the state-of-the-art off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that is within the maximum entropy based RL framework. SAC is demonstrated to perform very well in a list of continous control tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Zhenyang Shi , Surya P. N. Singh

During recent years, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has made successful incursions into complex decision-making applications such as robotics, autonomous driving or video games. Off-policy algorithms tend to be more sample-efficient than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Jesus Bujalance Martin , Raphael Chekroun , Fabien Moutarde

Recently, safe reinforcement learning (RL) with the actor-critic structure for continuous control tasks has received increasing attention. It is still challenging to learn a near-optimal control policy with safety and convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Xinglong Zhang , Yaoqian Peng , Biao Luo , Wei Pan , Xin Xu , Haibin Xie

Soft robotic manipulators offer operational advantage due to their compliant and deformable structures. However, their inherently nonlinear dynamics presents substantial challenges. Traditional analytical methods often depend on simplifying…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Uljad Berdica , Matthew Jackson , Niccolò Enrico Veronese , Jakob Foerster , Perla Maiolino

We study robust reinforcement learning (RL) with the goal of determining a well-performing policy that is robust against model mismatch between the training simulator and the testing environment. Previous policy-based robust RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Ruida Zhou , Tao Liu , Min Cheng , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has become the de facto standard for training legged robots, thanks to its robustness and scalability in massively parallel simulation environments like IsaacLab. However, its on-policy nature makes it…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Gianluca Sabatini , Chenhao Li , Marco Hutter

Autonomous racing presents unique challenges due to its non-linear dynamics, the high speed involved, and the critical need for real-time decision-making under dynamic and unpredictable conditions. Most traditional Reinforcement Learning…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Benedict Hildisch , Edoardo Ghignone , Nicolas Baumann , Cheng Hu , Andrea Carron , Michele Magno