Gray-Box Computed Torque Control for Differential-Drive Mobile Robot Tracking

This study presents a learning - based nonlinear algorithm for tracking control of differential - drive mobile robots. The Computed Torque Method (CTM) suffers from inaccurate knowledge of system parameters, while Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithms a re known for sample inefficiency and weak stability guarantees. The proposed method replaces the black box policy network of a DRL agent with a gray box Computed Torque Controller (CTC) to improve sample efficiency and ensure closed loop stability. This ap proach enables finding an optimal set of controller parameters for an arbitrary reward function using only a few short learning episodes. The Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3) algorithm is used for this purpose. Additionally, some controller parameters are constrained to lie within known value ranges, ensuring the RL agent learns physically plausible values. A technique is also ap plied to enforce a critically damped closed loop time response. The controller's performance is evaluated on a differential drive mobile robot simulated in the MuJoCo physics engine and compared against the raw CTC and a conventional kinematic controller.