Abstract
Data-driven Model Predictive Control (MPC) has lately been a core research subject in the field of control theory. The combination of an optimal control framework with deep learning paradigms opens up the possibility to accurately tracking control tasks without the need for complex analytical models. However, the system dynamics are often nuanced and the neural model lacks the potential to understand physical properties such as inertia and conservation of energy. In this work, we propose a novel energy-based regularization loss function which is applied to the training of a neural model that learns the residual dynamics of an omnidirectional aerial robot. Our energy-based regularization encourages the neural network to learn stabilizing control corrections. Without the regularization the network misses physical context. The learned residual dynamics are then integrated into the MPC framework. The positional mean absolute error (MAE) are shown to be improved in three real-world experiments by 23% compared to the analytical MPC. We also compare our method to a standard neural MPC implementation without regularization and primarily achieve an increased flight stability implicitly due to smoothening out the acceleration of the robot and thus up to 15% lower MAE. A complimentary video is available at: this https URL. We share our code under: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.14678
