A variety of methods for developing quasi-optimal intelligent control systems using reinforcement learning techniques based on adaptive critics have appeared in recent years. This paper reviews the family of approximate dynamic programming techniques based on adaptive critic methods and introduces a new hybrid critic training method.

An intelligent robot is a remarkably useful combination of a manipulator, sensors and controls. The use of these machines in factory automation can improve productivity, increase product quality and improve competitiveness. This paper presents a discussion of recent and future technical and economic trends. During the past twenty years the use of industrial robots that are equipped not only wit...

The highest priority of so called, projected passive houses is to meet the appropriate energy demand. Every single material and layer which is injected into a dwelling has a certain energy quantity stored. The passive houses include optimized insulation levels with minimal thermal bridges, minimum of air leakage through the building, utilization of passive solar and internal gains, and good cir...

This paper presents a model-based actorcritic algorithm in continuous time and space. Two function approximators are used: one learns the policy (the actor) and the other learns the state-value function (the critic). The critic learns with the TD(λ) algorithm and the actor by gradient ascent on the Hamiltonian. A similar algorithm had been proposed by Doya, but this one is more general. This al...

The ability to learn at different resolutions in time may help overcome one of the main challenges in deep reinforcement learning — sample efficiency. Hierarchical agents that operate at different levels of temporal abstraction can learn tasks more quickly because they can divide the work of learning behaviors among multiple policies and can also explore the environment at a higher level. In th...

Eigenoptions (EOs) have been recently introduced as a promising idea for generating a diverse set of options through the graph Laplacian, having been shown to allow efficient exploration Machado et al. [2017a]. Despite its first initial promising results, a couple of issues in current algorithms limit its application, namely: 1) EO methods require two separate steps (eigenoption discovery and r...