RoKON: Efficient and Adaptive Data-Enabled Predictive Control for Robotic Manipulation

Data-enabled predictive control has recently emerged as a promising control paradigm, enabling a transparent optimal-control formulation without the need to learn an explicit dynamics model. This paper presents a number of extensions paving the path towards its use in real-time robotics tasks. Following recent work, we utilize a nonlinear predictor based on Gaussian kernels to represent the relationship between input and output data. We propose a damped Gauss-Newton method that enables real-time control by efficiently exploiting the least-squares structure of the control problem. In addition, we introduce a hybrid buffer management strategy that incorporates informative online data while retaining relevant offline data, allowing the predictor to account for changes in the dynamics. We demonstrate the tracking performance and computational suitability of the proposed method in MuJoCo using a Franka Research 3 arm pushing a block across surface, without prior knowledge of its changing friction values.