Model Estimation Within Planning and Learning

Abstract

Risk and reward are fundamental concepts in the cooperative control of unmanned systems. In this research, we focus on developing a constructive relationship between cooperative planning and learning algorithms to mitigate the learning risk, while boosting system (planner & learner) asymptotic performance and guaranteeing the safety of agent behavior. Our framework is an instance of the intelligent cooperative control architecture (iCCA) where the learner incrementally improves on the output of a baseline planner through interaction and constrained exploration. We extend previous work by extracting the embedded parameterized transition model from within the cooperative planner and making it adaptable and accessible to all iCCA modules. We empirically demonstrate the advantage of using an adaptive model over a static model and pure learning approaches in an example GridWorld problem and a UAV mission planning scenario with 200 million possibilities. Finally we discuss two extensions to our approach to handle cases where the true model can not be captured exactly through the presumed functional form.