Heuristic and deep reinforcement learning-based PID control of trajectory tracking in a ball-and-plate system

ABSTRACT The manual tuning of controller parameters, for example, tuning proportional integral derivative (PID) gains often relies on tedious human engineering. To curb the aforementioned problem, we propose an artificial intelligence-based deep reinforcement learning (RL) PID controller (three variants) compared with genetic algorithm-based PID (GA-PID) and classical PID; a total of five controllers were simulated for controlling and trajectory tracking of the ball dynamics in a linearized ball-and-plate ( ) system. For the experiments, we trained novel variants of deep RL-PID built from a customized deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) agent (by modifying the neural network architecture), resulting in two new RL agents (DDPG-FC-350-R-PID & DDPG-FC-350-E-PID). Each of the agents interacts with the environment through a policy and a learning algorithm to produce a set of actions (optimal PID gains). Additionally, we evaluated the five controllers to assess which method provides the best performance metrics in the context of the minimum index in predictive errors, steady-state-error, peak overshoot, and time-responses. The results show that our proposed architecture (DDPG-FC-350-E-PID) yielded the best performance and surpasses all other approaches on most of the evaluation metric indices. Furthermore, an appropriate training of an artificial intelligence-based controller can aid to obtain the best path tracking.