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2006 NIPS NeurIPS 2006

An Application of Reinforcement Learning to Aerobatic Helicopter Flight

Abstract

Autonomous helicopter flight is widely regarded to be a highly challenging control problem. This paper presents the first successful autonomous completion on a real RC helicopter of the following four aerobatic maneuvers: forward flip and sideways roll at low speed, tail-in funnel, and nose-in funnel. Our experimental results significantly extend the state of the art in autonomous helicopter flight. We used the following approach: First we had a pilot fly the helicopter to help us find a helicopter dynamics model and a reward (cost) function. Then we used a reinforcement learning (optimal control) algorithm to find a controller that is optimized for the resulting model and reward function. More specifically, we used differential dynamic programming (DDP), an extension of the linear quadratic regulator (LQR).

🚀 Conference Pioneer — NIPS 2006
🌱 Topic Pioneer — Robotics
🌉 Interdisciplinary Bridge — Reinforcement Learning and Robotics
📈 Trend Setter — Deep RL
🧭 Keyword Pioneer — helicopter flight control
🐣 Hot Topic Early Bird — reinforcement learning
🐝 Cross-Pollinator — Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Computer Vision, Data Science & Analytics, Deep Learning, Healthcare & Medicine, Interdisciplinary, Knowledge & Reasoning, Machine Learning, Mathematics & Optimization, Natural Language Processing, Reinforcement Learning, Robotics

Authors

Pieter Abbeel , Adam Coates , Morgan Quigley , Andrew Y. Ng

Topics

Reinforcement Learning > Methods > Deep RL Reinforcement Learning > Methods > Policy Learning Reinforcement Learning > Applications > Robotics Robotics Robotics > Systems > Control Systems Machine Learning > Learning Types > Reinforcement Learning Artificial Intelligence > Core AI > Robotics Robotics > Applications > Robotics

Keywords

reinforcement learning helicopter flight control aerobatic control policy learning autonomous helicopter differential dynamic programming optimal control aerobatic flight model-based reinforcement learning linear quadratic regulator helicopter control helicopter flight
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