Designing a Robust Low-Level Agnostic Controller for a Quadrotor with Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Purpose: Real-life applications using quadrotors introduce a number of disturbances and time-varying properties that pose a challenge to flight controllers. We observed that, when a quadrotor is tasked with picking up and dropping a payload, traditional PID and RL-based controllers found in literature struggle to maintain flight after the vehicle changes its dynamics due to interaction with this external object. Methods: In this work, we introduce domain randomization during the training phase of a low-level waypoint guidance controller based on Soft Actor-Critic. The resulting controller is evaluated on the proposed payload pick up and drop task with added disturbances that emulate real-life operation of the vehicle. Results & Conclusion: We show that, by introducing a certain degree of uncertainty in quadrotor dynamics during training, we can obtain a controller that is capable to perform the proposed task using a larger variation of quadrotor parameters. Additionally, the RL-based controller outperforms a traditional positional PID controller with optimized gains in this task, while remaining agnostic to different simulation parameters.