Title
Learning Throttle Valve Control Using Policy Search
Abstract
The throttle valve is a technical device used for regulating a fluid or a gas flow. Throttle valve control is a challenging task, due to its complex dynamics and demanding constraints for the controller. Using state-of-the-art throttle valve control, such as model-free PID controllers, time-consuming and manual adjusting of the controller is necessary. In this paper, we investigate how reinforcement learning (RL) can help to alleviate the effort of manual controller design by automatically learning a control policy from experiences. In order to obtain a valid control policy for the throttle valve, several constraints need to be addressed, such as no-overshoot. Furthermore, the learned controller must be able to follow given desired trajectories, while moving the valve from any start to any goal position and, thus, multi-targets policy learning needs to be considered for RL. In this study, we employ a policy search RL approach, Pilco [2], to learn a throttle valve control policy. We adapt the Pilco algorithm, while taking into account the practical requirements and constraints for the controller. For evaluation, we employ the resulting algorithm to solve several control tasks in simulation, as well as on a physical throttle valve system. The results show that policy search RL is able to learn a consistent control policy for complex, real-world systems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1007/978-3-642-40988-2_4
ECML/PKDD (1)
Field
DocType
Citations 
Control theory,Complex dynamics,PID controller,Controller design,Policy learning,Control theory,Computer science,Throttle,Reinforcement learning
Conference
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.68
6
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bastian Bischoff115410.64
duy nguyentuong243826.22
Torsten Koller361.35
Heiner Markert4535.97
Alois Knoll Knoll51700271.32