An adaptive deep reinforcement learning approach for MIMO PID control of mobile robots

Intelligent control systems are being developed for the control of plants with complex dynamics. However, the simplicity of the PID (proportional–integrative–derivative) controller makes it still widely used in industrial applications and robotics. This paper proposes an intelligent control system based on a deep reinforcement learning approach for self-adaptive multiple PID controllers for mobile robots. The proposed hybrid control strategy uses an actor–critic structure and it only receives low-level dynamic information as input and simultaneously estimates the multiple parameters or gains of the PID controllers. The proposed approach was tested in several simulated environments and in a real time robotic platform showing the feasibility of the approach for the low-level control of mobile robots. From the simulation and experimental results, our proposed approach demonstrated that it can be of aid by providing with behavior that can compensate or even adapt to changes in the uncertain environments providing a model free unsupervised solution. Also, a comparative study against other adaptive methods for multiple PIDs tuning is presented, showing a successful performance of the approach. • Adaptive PID-based low-level control strategy. • MIMO PIDs are tuned by means of deep reinforcement learning. • Critic’s gradients are inverted to achieve actions within the required range. • Results on real time robots demonstrate the feasibility of the proposal.