Bayesian Machine Learning for Controlling Autonomous Systems

Autonomous learning has been a promising direction in control and robotics for more than a decade since learning models and controllers from data allows us to reduce the amount of engineering knowledge that is otherwise required. Due to their flexibility, autonomous reinforcement learning (RL) approaches typically require many interactions with the system to learn controllers. However, in real systems, such as robots, many interactions can be impractical and time consuming. To address this problem, current learning approaches typically require task-specific knowledge in form of expert demonstrations, pre-shaped policies, or specific knowledge about the underlying dynamics. \n We follow a different approach and speed up learning by efficiently extracting information from sparse data. In particular, we learn a probabilistic, non-parametric Gaussian process dynamics model. By explicitly incorporating model uncertainty into long-term planning and controller learning our approach reduces the effects of model errors, a key problem in model-based learning. Bayesian inference leads to an automatic exploration/exploitation trade-off, such that our model-based policy search method achieves an unprecedented speed of learning compared to state-of-the art RL. We demonstrate its applicability to autonomous learning in real robot and control tasks.