A Fast Initialization Method for Neural Network Controllers: A Case Study of Image-based Visual Servoing Control for the multicopter Interception

Abstract: Reinforcement learning-based controller design methods often require substantial data in the initial training phase. Moreover, the training process tends to exhibit strong randomness and slow convergence. It often requires considerable time or high computational resources. Another class of learning-based method incorporates Lyapunov stability theory to obtain a control policy with stability guarantees. However, these methods generally require an initially stable neural network control policy at the beginning of training. Evidently, a stable neural network controller can not only serve as an initial policy for reinforcement learning, allowing the training to focus on improving controller performance, but also act as an initial state for learning-based Lyapunov control methods. Although stable controllers can be designed using traditional control theory, designers still need to have a great deal of control design knowledge to address increasingly complicated control problems. The proposed neural network rapid initialization method in this paper achieves the initial training of the neural network control policy by constructing datasets that conform to the stability conditions based on the system model. Furthermore, using the image-based visual servoing control for multicopter interception as a case study, simulations and experiments were conducted to validate the effectiveness and practical performance of the proposed method. In the experiment, the trained control policy attains a final interception velocity of 15 m/s.