Scalable Safe Exploration for Global Optimization of Dynamical Systems [article]

Bhavya Sukhija, Matteo Turchetta, David Lindner, Andreas Krause, Sebastian Trimpe, Dominik Baumann
2022
Learning optimal control policies directly on physical systems is challenging since even a single failure can lead to costly hardware damage. Most existing learning methods that guarantee safety, i.e., no failures, during exploration are limited to local optima. A notable exception is the GoSafe algorithm, which, unfortunately, cannot handle high-dimensional systems and hence cannot be applied to most real-world dynamical systems. This work proposes GoSafeOpt as the first algorithm that can
more » ... ly discover globally optimal policies for complex systems while giving safety and optimality guarantees. Our experiments on a robot arm that would be prohibitive for GoSafe demonstrate that GoSafeOpt safely finds remarkably better policies than competing safe learning methods for high-dimensional domains.
doi:10.48550/arxiv.2201.09562 fatcat:paulnuq5rfajhkainfippwyska