Reinforcement Learning And Its Application To Control

REINFORCEMENT LEARNING AND ITS APPLICATION TO CONTROL February 1992 Vijaykumar Gullapalli, B.S., Birla Institute of Technology and Science, India M.S., University of Massachusetts Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Directed by: Professor Andrew G. Barto Learning control involves modifying a controller's behavior to improve its performance as measured by some predefined index of performance (IP). If control actions that improve performance as measured by the IP are known, supervised learning methods, or methods for learning from examples, can be used to train the controller. But when such control actions are not known a priori, appropriate control behavior has to be inferred from observations of the IP. One can distinguish between two classes of methods for training controllers under such circumstances. Indirect methods involve constructing a model of the problem's IP and using the model to obtain training information for the controller. On the other hand, direct, or model-free, metho..