Learning throttle valve control using policy search

The throttle valve is a technical device used for regulating a fluid or a gas flow. Throttle valve control is a challenging task, due to its complex dynamics and demanding constraints for the controller. Using state-of-the-art throttle valve control, such as model-free PID controllers, time-consuming and manual adjusting of the controller is necessary. In this paper, we investigate how reinforcement learning (RL) can help to alleviate the effort of manual controller design by automatically learning a control policy from experiences. In order to obtain a valid control policy for the throttle valve, several constraints need to be addressed, such as no-overshoot. Furthermore, the learned controller must be able to follow given desired trajectories, while moving the valve from any start to any goal position and, thus, multi-targets policy learning needs to be considered for RL. In this study, we employ a policy search RL approach, Pilco [2], to learn a throttle valve control policy. We adapt the Pilco algorithm, while taking into account the practical requirements and constraints for the controller. For evaluation, we employ the resulting algorithm to solve several control tasks in simulation, as well as on a physical throttle valve system. The results show that policy search RL is able to learn a consistent control policy for complex, real-world systems.