-- This report presents our reinforcement learning-based approach for the swing-up and stabilisation tasks of the acrobot and pendubot, tailored specifcially to the updated guidelines of the 3rd AI Olympics at ICRA 2025. Building upon our previously developed A verage-Reward Entropy Advantage Policy Optimization (AR-EAPO) algorithm, we refined our solution to effectively address the new competition scenarios and evaluation metrics. Extensive simulations validate that our controller robustly manages these revised tasks, demonstrating adaptability and effectiveness within the updated framework. Building upon prior competitions at IJCAI 2023 [3] and IROS 2024 [4], the current edition places particular emphasis on global policy robustness, requiring solutions for reliable swing-up stabilisation tasks from arbitrary initial configurations under significantly increased external disturbances. The competition maintains its use of two different configurations: the acrobot, characterised by an inactive shoulder joint, and the pendubot, with an inactive elbow joint.

Abstract--We present an iterative approach for planning and controlling motions of underactuated robots with uncertain dynamics. At its core, there is a learning process which estimates the perturbations induced by the model uncertainty on the active and passive degrees of freedom. The generic iteration of the algorithm makes use of the learned data in both the planning phase, which is based on optimization, and the control phase, where partial feedback linearization of the active dofs is performed on the model updated on-line. The performance of the proposed approach is shown by comparative simulations and experiments on a Pendubot executing various types of swing-up maneuvers. Very few iterations are typically needed to generate dynamically feasible trajectories and the tracking control that guarantees their accurate execution, even in the presence of large model uncertainties.

This report presents a solution for the swing-up and stabilisation tasks of the acrobot and the pendubot, developed for the AI Olympics competition at IROS 2024. Our approach employs the Average-Reward Entropy Advantage Policy Optimization (AR-EAPO), a model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that combines average-reward RL and maximum entropy RL. Results demonstrate that our controller achieves improved performance and robustness scores compared to established baseline methods in both the acrobot and pendubot scenarios, without the need for a heavily engineered reward function or system model. The current results are applicable exclusively to the simulation stage setup.

In the following report, we describe the solution we propose for the AI Olympics competition held at IROS 2024. Our solution is based on a Model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning approach combined with an evolutionary strategy. We will briefly describe the algorithms that have been used and then provide details of the approach