Leveraging Multi-Level Modelling to Automatically Design Behavioral Arbitrators in Robotic Controllers

Automatic control design for robotic systems is becoming more and more popular. However, this usually involves a significant computational cost, due to the expensive and noisy evaluation of candidate solutions through highfidelity simulation or even real hardware. This work aims at reducing the computational cost of automatic design of behavioral arbitrators through the introduction of a two-step approach. In the first step, the structure of the finite state machine governing the behavioral arbitrator is optimized. To this purpose, a more abstracted model of the robotic system is leveraged in order to significantly reduce the computational cost. In the second step, the close-to-hardware, behavioral parameters are fine-tuned using a high-fidelity model. We show that, for a scenario involving a single robot and multiple tasks to be solved sequentially, using the proposed method results in a significant decrease of the computational cost while reaching the same controller performance both in simulation and reality.