Experience Transfer for Robust Direct Data-Driven Control

Learning-based control uses data to design efficient controllers for specific systems. When multiple systems are involved, experience transfer usually focuses on data availability and controller performance yet neglects robustness to variations between systems. In contrast, this letter explores experience transfer from a robustness perspective. We leverage the transfer to design controllers that are robust not only to the uncertainty regarding an individual agent's model but also to the choice of agent in a fleet. Experience transfer enables the design of safe and robust controllers that work out of the box for all systems in a heterogeneous fleet. Our approach combines scenario optimization and recent formulations for direct data-driven control without the need to estimate a model of the system or determine uncertainty bounds for its parameters. We demonstrate the benefits of our data-driven robustification method through a numerical case study and obtain learned controllers that generalize well from a small number of open-loop trajectories in a quadcopter simulation.