Robust direct data-driven control for probabilistic systems

We propose a data-driven control method for systems with aleatoric uncertainty, such as robot fleets with variations between agents. Our method leverages shared trajectory data to increase the robustness of the designed controller and thus facilitate transfer to new variations without the need for prior parameter and uncertainty estimation. In contrast to existing work on experience transfer for performance, our approach focuses on robustness and uses data collected from multiple realizations to guarantee generalization to unseen ones. Our method is based on scenario optimization combined with recent formulations for direct data-driven control. We derive upper bounds on the minimal amount of data required to provably achieve quadratic stability for probabilistic systems with aleatoric uncertainty and demonstrate the benefits of our data-driven method through a numerical example. We find that the learned controllers generalize well to high variations in the dynamics even when based on only a few short open-loop trajectories. Robust experience transfer enables the design of safe and robust controllers that work “out of the box” without additional learning during deployment.