Learning to control from expert demonstrations

In this paper, we revisit the problem of learning a stabilizing controller from a finite number of demonstrations by an expert. By first focusing on feedback linearizable systems, we show how to combine expert demonstrations into a stabilizing controller, provided that demonstrations are sufficiently long and there are at least \(n+1\) of them, where \(n\) is the number of states of the system being controlled. When we have more than \(n+1\) demonstrations, we discuss how to optimally choose the best \(n+1\) demonstrations to construct the stabilizing controller. We then extend these results to a class of systems that can be embedded into a higher-dimensional system containing a chain of integrators. The feasibility of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated by applying it on a CrazyFlie 2.0 quadrotor.