Learning-Based Balance Control of Wheel-Legged Robots

This letter studies the adaptive optimal control problem for a wheel-legged robot in the absence of an accurate dynamic model. A crucial strategy is to exploit recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) and adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) to derive a learning-based solution to adaptive optimal control. It is shown that suboptimal controllers can be learned directly from input-state data collected along the trajectories of the robot. Rigorous proofs for the convergence of the novel data-driven value iteration (VI) algorithm and the stability of the closed-loop robot system are provided. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of the novel adaptive suboptimal controller derived from the data-driven VI algorithm in balancing the wheel-legged robot to the equilibrium.