Model-Based Safe Policy Search from Signal Temporal Logic Specifications Using Recurrent Neural Networks

We propose a policy search approach to learn controllers from specifications given as Signal Temporal Logic (STL) formulae. The system model is unknown, and it is learned together with the control policy. The model is implemented as a feedforward neural network (FNN). To capture the history dependency of the STL specification, we use a recurrent neural network (RNN) to implement the control policy. In contrast to prevalent model-free methods, the learning approach proposed here takes advantage of the learned model and is more efficient. We use control barrier functions (CBFs) with the learned model to improve the safety of the system. We validate our algorithm via simulations. The results show that our approach can satisfy the given specification within very few system runs, and therefore it has the potential to be used for on-line control.