Safety-Aware Reinforcement Learning Framework with an Actor-Critic-Barrier Structure

This paper considers the control problem with constraints on full-state and control input simultaneously. First, a novel barrier function based system transformation approach is developed to guarantee the full-state constraints. To deal with the input saturation, the hyperbolic-type penalty function is imposed on the control input. The actor-critic based reinforcement learning technique is combined with the barrier transformation to learn the optimal control policy that considers both the full-state constraints and input saturations. To illustrate the efficacy, a numeric simulation is implemented in the end