Reinforcement learning approach to control an inverted pendulum: A general framework for educational purposes

Sardor Israilov, Li Fu, Jesús Sánchez-Rodríguez, Franco Fusco, Guillaume Allibert, Christophe Raufaste and Médéric Argentina

PLOS ONE, 2023, vol. 18, issue 2, 1-15

Abstract: Machine learning is often cited as a new paradigm in control theory, but is also often viewed as empirical and less intuitive for students than classical model-based methods. This is particularly the case for reinforcement learning, an approach that does not require any mathematical model to drive a system inside an unknown environment. This lack of intuition can be an obstacle to design experiments and implement this approach. Reversely there is a need to gain experience and intuition from experiments. In this article, we propose a general framework to reproduce successful experiments and simulations based on the inverted pendulum, a classic problem often used as a benchmark to evaluate control strategies. Two algorithms (basic Q-Learning and Deep Q-Networks (DQN)) are introduced, both in experiments and in simulation with a virtual environment, to give a comprehensive understanding of the approach and discuss its implementation on real systems. In experiments, we show that learning over a few hours is enough to control the pendulum with high accuracy. Simulations provide insights about the effect of each physical parameter and tests the feasibility and robustness of the approach.

Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0280071

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0280071

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