Gaussian Process Dual MPC using Active Inference: An Autonomous Vehicle Usecase

Abstract: Designing controllers under uncertainty requires balancing the need to explore system dynamics with the requirement to maintain reliable control performance. Dual control addresses this challenge by selecting actions that both regulate the system and actively gather informative data. This paper investigates the use of the Active Inference framework, grounded in the Free Energy Principle, for developing a dual model-predictive controller (MPC). To identify and quantify uncertainty, we introduce an online sparse semi-parametric Gaussian Process model that combines the flexibility of nonparametric with the efficiency of parametric learning for real-time updates. By applying the expected free energy functional to this adaptive probabilistic model, we derive an MPC objective that incorporates an information-theoretic term, which captures uncertainty arising from both the learned model and measurement noise. This formulation leads to a stochastic optimal control problem for dual controller design, which is solved using a novel dynamic-programming-based method. Simulation results on a vehicle use case demonstrate that the proposed algorithm enhances autonomous driving control performance across different settings and scenarios.