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A Heuristic Approach for Performance Tuning in RL-based Quadrotor Control via Reward Design and Termination Conditions
Luleå University of Technology, Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering, Signals and Systems.ORCID iD: 0009-0005-1428-247X
Luleå University of Technology, Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering, Signals and Systems.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-3794-0306
Luleå University of Technology, Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering, Signals and Systems.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-5709-0591
Luleå University of Technology, Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering, Signals and Systems.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-0126-1897
2026 (English)In: Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. , 2026, p. 461-466Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based quadrotor control policies have achieved impressive performance in tasks such as fast navigation in cluttered environments and drone racing, where the focus is on speed and agility. However, in several applications, such as infrastructure inspection, it is critical to achieve precise, controlled maneuvers with tunable performance. In this article, we present a novel heuristic approach to achieve tunable performance in RL-based Quadrotor control through reward design and termination conditions. We present a novel reward structure containing dual bandwidth exponential functions that achieves a baseline critically damped response in setpoint tracking, with small steady-state error. When trained with a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm, in conjunction with episode truncation conditions, the desired performance is achieved in 6 million time steps of training in a sample-efficient manner. In order to tune the performance about the baseline behavior, we present intuitive heuristic rules to adjust the reward weights and exponential coefficients to achieve faster (acrobatic-like) and slower (inspection-like) settling time performance, while retaining the baseline critically damped response and approximately 2% steady-state error. We evaluate the three RL policies (baseline, acrobatic, and inspection) across 100 trials and show accurate and tunable performance in position and yaw tracking from random initial conditions, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic approach.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. , 2026. p. 461-466
National Category
Robotics and automation Control Engineering Computer Sciences
Research subject
Robotics and Artificial Intelligence
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ltu:diva-119502DOI: 10.1109/MED70602.2026.11598456Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105046123098OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ltu-119502DiVA, id: diva2:2094997
Conference
34th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation, (MED 2026), Ancona, Italy, 23-26 June, 2026
Note

ISBN for host publication: 979-8-3195-4747-7

Available from: 2026-08-25 Created: 2026-08-25 Last updated: 2026-08-25Bibliographically approved

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Suarez, Fausto Mauricio LagosSaradagi, AkshitSumathy, VidyaNikolakopoulos, George
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