Free-Gate: Planning, Control And Policy Composition via Free Energy Gating

Abstract

We consider the problem of optimally composing a set of primitives to tackle planning and control tasks. To address this problem, we introduce a free energy computational model for planning and control via policy composition: Free-Gate. Within Free-Gate, control primitives are combined via a gating mechanism that minimizes variational free energy. This composition problem is formulated as a finite-horizon optimal control problem, which we prove remains convex even when the cost is not convex in states/actions and the environment is nonlinear, stochastic and non-stationary. We develop an algorithm that computes the optimal primitives composition and demonstrate its effectiveness via in-silico and hardware experiments on an application involving robot navigation in an environment with obstacles. The experiments highlight that Free-Gate enables the robot to navigate to the destination despite only having available simple motor primitives that, individually, could not fulfill the task.