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Transferring a Learned Qualitative Cart-Pole Control Model to Uneven Terrains

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Discovery Science (DS 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 14276))

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Abstract

Qualitative modeling can be applied to the control of dynamic systems by following these steps: (1) learning a qualitative model of the controlled dynamic system from the system’s behaviors in time, (2) using the learned model to derive a qualitative plan for the control task, and (3) executing the qualitative plan on an actual dynamic system. This approach has been demonstrated in the usual cart-pole control domain as significantly more sample efficient than the usual variants of reinforcement learning, by at least two orders of magnitude. The qualitative approach also enables better explanation of the learned control strategy through symbolic planning. In this paper, we generalize the cart-pole problem to uneven terrains, such as driving over a crater or a hill. We study whether the learned flat-surface qualitative controller can be successfully transferred to the tasks of negotiating uneven terrain. Experiments show that the flat-surface qualitative controller is remarkably robust on new, more difficult tasks.

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Correspondence to Domen Šoberl .

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Šoberl, D., Bratko, I. (2023). Transferring a Learned Qualitative Cart-Pole Control Model to Uneven Terrains. In: Bifet, A., Lorena, A.C., Ribeiro, R.P., Gama, J., Abreu, P.H. (eds) Discovery Science. DS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14276. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45275-8_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45275-8_30

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