A feedback control structure for on-line learning tasks

This paper addresses adaptive control architectures for systems that respond autonomously to changing tasks. Such systems often have many sensory and motor alternatives and behavior drawn from these produces varying quality solutions. The objective is then to ground behavior in control laws which, combined with resources , enumerate closed-loop behavioral alternatives. Use of such controllers leads to analyzable and predictable composite systems, permitting the construction of abstract behavioral models. Here, discrete event system and reinforcement learning techniques are employed to constrain the behavioral alternatives and to synthesize behavior on-line. To illustrate this, a quadruped robot learning a turning gait subject to safety and kinematic constraints is presented.