Attitude Control of Quad-copter using Deterministic Policy Gradient Algorithms (DPGA)

Abstract

In aerial robotics, intelligent control has been a buzz for the past few years. Extensive research efforts can be witnessed to produce control algorithms for stable flight operation of aerial robots using machine learning. Supervised learning has the tendency but training an agent using supervised learning can be a tedious task. Moreover, the data gathering could be expensive and always prone to inaccuracies due to parametric variations and system dynamics. An alternative approach is to ensure the stability of the aerial robots with the help of Deep Re-inforcement Learning (DRL). This paper deals with the intelligent control of quad-copter using deterministic policy gradient algorithms. In this research, state of the art Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) and Distributed Distributional Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (D4PG) algorithms are employed for attitude control of quad-copter. An open source simulation environment GymFC is used for training of quad-copter. The results for comparative analysis of DDPG & D4PG algorithms are also presented, highlighting the attitude control performance.