Kevin Van Vaerenbergh, Peter Vrancx, Yann-Michaël De Hauwere, Ann Nowé, Erik Hostens, Christophe Lauwerys, Tuning hydrostatic two-output drive-train controllers using reinforcement learning, Mechatronics, Volume 24, Issue 8, December 2014, Pages 975-985, ISSN 0957-4158. DOI: 10.1016/j.mechatronics.2014.07.005
When controlling a complex system consisting of several subsystems, a simple divide and conquer approach is to design a controller for each system separately. However, this does not necessarily result in a good overall control behavior. Especially when there are strong interactions between the subsystems, the selfish behavior of one controller might deteriorate the performance of the other subsystems. An alternative approach is to design a global controller for the entire mechatronic system. Such a design procedure might result in more optimal behavior, however it requires a lot more effort, especially when the interactions between the different subsystems cannot be modeled exactly or if the number of parameters is large.
In this paper we present a hybrid approach to this problem that overcomes the problems encountered when using several independent subsystems. Starting from such a system with individual subsystem controllers, we add a global layer which uses reinforcement learning to simultaneously tune the lower level controllers. While each subsystem still has its own individual controller, the reinforcement learning layer is used to tune these controllers in order to optimize global system behavior. This mitigates both the problem of subsystems behaving selfishly without the added complexity of designing a global controller for the entire system. Our approach is validated on a hydrostatic drive train.