Academic Lecture 202162

Title: Reinforcement Learning-Based Control of Uncertain Nonlinear Systems

Speaker: Lihua XIE(Nanyang Technological University)

Time: 10:30-11:30, Nov 30th

Place: South Building 1, Room 314(middle)

About the Lecture...

Reinforcement learning (RL), inspired by learning behaviour in nature, is a goal-oriented learning strategy wherein the agent learns the policy to optimize a pre-defined reward by interacting with the environment. For being data-driven, effectiveness in reaching optimal behavior, and adaptiveness to uncertain environment, RL has undergone rapid development in control community. In this talk, we shall first discuss RL based disturbance rejection control for uncertain nonlinear systems with known nominal part. An extended state observer is first designed to estimate the system state and the total uncertainty. Based on the output of the observer, the control compensates for the total uncertainty in real time, and simultaneously, online approximates the optimal policy for the compensated system using a simulation of experience based RL technique. The approach does not require PE condition or probing signals. We then extend the study to systems with unknown nominal part, where a novel concurrent adaptive extended observer is developed to jointly estimate the parameters of the systems and the state, and a simulation of experience based RL is used to approximate the optimal policy.

About the Speaker...

Lihua XIE received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical engineering from Nanjing University of Science and Technology in 1983 and 1986, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Newcastle, Australia, in 1992. Since 1992, he has been with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, where he is currently Professor. Dr XIE is a Fellow of the Academy of Engineering Singapore, Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of IFAC, and Fellow of the Chinese Automation Association. He was an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer from 2011 to 2014. He is a Vice-President, Control Theory and Application Committee, the Chinese Automation Association.