Contextual Tuning of Model Predictive Control for Autonomous Racing

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fröhlich, Lukas P., Küttel, Christian, Arcari, Elena, Hewing, Lukas, Zeilinger, Melanie N., Carron, Andrea
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
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author Fröhlich, Lukas P.
Küttel, Christian
Arcari, Elena
Hewing, Lukas
Zeilinger, Melanie N.
Carron, Andrea
author_facet Fröhlich, Lukas P.
Küttel, Christian
Arcari, Elena
Hewing, Lukas
Zeilinger, Melanie N.
Carron, Andrea
contents Learning-based model predictive control has been widely applied in autonomous racing to improve the closed-loop behaviour of vehicles in a data-driven manner. When environmental conditions change, e.g., due to rain, often only the predictive model is adapted, but the controller parameters are kept constant. However, this can lead to suboptimal behaviour. In this paper, we address the problem of data-efficient controller tuning, adapting both the model and objective simultaneously. The key novelty of the proposed approach is that we leverage a learned dynamics model to encode the environmental condition as a so-called context. This insight allows us to employ contextual Bayesian optimization to efficiently transfer knowledge across different environmental conditions. Consequently, we require fewer data to find the optimal controller configuration for each context. The proposed framework is extensively evaluated with more than 3'000 laps driven on an experimental platform with 1:28 scale RC race cars. The results show that our approach successfully optimizes the lap time across different contexts requiring fewer data compared to other approaches based on standard Bayesian optimization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2110_02710
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Contextual Tuning of Model Predictive Control for Autonomous Racing
Fröhlich, Lukas P.
Küttel, Christian
Arcari, Elena
Hewing, Lukas
Zeilinger, Melanie N.
Carron, Andrea
Robotics
Systems and Control
Learning-based model predictive control has been widely applied in autonomous racing to improve the closed-loop behaviour of vehicles in a data-driven manner. When environmental conditions change, e.g., due to rain, often only the predictive model is adapted, but the controller parameters are kept constant. However, this can lead to suboptimal behaviour. In this paper, we address the problem of data-efficient controller tuning, adapting both the model and objective simultaneously. The key novelty of the proposed approach is that we leverage a learned dynamics model to encode the environmental condition as a so-called context. This insight allows us to employ contextual Bayesian optimization to efficiently transfer knowledge across different environmental conditions. Consequently, we require fewer data to find the optimal controller configuration for each context. The proposed framework is extensively evaluated with more than 3'000 laps driven on an experimental platform with 1:28 scale RC race cars. The results show that our approach successfully optimizes the lap time across different contexts requiring fewer data compared to other approaches based on standard Bayesian optimization.
title Contextual Tuning of Model Predictive Control for Autonomous Racing
topic Robotics
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.02710