Paper ID: 2201.09562

GoSafeOpt: Scalable Safe Exploration for Global Optimization of Dynamical Systems

Bhavya Sukhija, Matteo Turchetta, David Lindner, Andreas Krause, Sebastian Trimpe, Dominik Baumann

Learning optimal control policies directly on physical systems is challenging since even a single failure can lead to costly hardware damage. Most existing model-free learning methods that guarantee safety, i.e., no failures, during exploration are limited to local optima. A notable exception is the GoSafe algorithm, which, unfortunately, cannot handle high-dimensional systems and hence cannot be applied to most real-world dynamical systems. This work proposes GoSafeOpt as the first algorithm that can safely discover globally optimal policies for high-dimensional systems while giving safety and optimality guarantees. We demonstrate the superiority of GoSafeOpt over competing model-free safe learning methods on a robot arm that would be prohibitive for GoSafe.

Submitted: Jan 24, 2022