Inverse Optimal Control for Multiphase Cost Functions

In this paper, we consider a dynamical system whose trajectory is a result of minimizing a multiphase cost function. The multiphase cost function is assumed to be a weighted sum of specified features (or basis functions) with phase-dependent weights that switch at some unknown phase transition points. A new inverse optimal control approach for recovering the cost weights of each phase and estimating the phase transition points is proposed. The key idea is to use a length-adapted window moving along the observed trajectory, where the window length is determined by finding the minimal observation length that suffices for a successful cost weight recovery. The effectiveness of the proposed method is first evaluated on a simulated robot arm, and then, demonstrated on a dataset of human participants performing a series of squatting tasks. The results demonstrate that the proposed method reliably retrieves the cost function of each phase and segments each phase of motion from the trajectory with a segmentation accuracy above 90%.