# Learning Agile Gate Traversal via Analytical Optimal Policy Gradient

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid control framework for quadrotors that adaptively fine-tunes model predictive control parameters using a neural network, enabling agile, accurate gate traversal and disturbance recovery demonstrated through hardware experiments.

## Contribution

A novel hybrid approach combining analytical policy gradients with MPC and neural networks for adaptive quadrotor gate traversal control.

## Key findings

- Successful hardware demonstration of agile gate traversal
- Peak accelerations of 30 m/s^2 achieved
- Recovery within 0.85 seconds after large disturbances

## Abstract

Traversing narrow gates presents a significant challenge and has become a standard benchmark for evaluating agile and precise quadrotor flight. Traditional modularized autonomous flight stacks require extensive design and parameter tuning, while end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) methods often suffer from low sample efficiency, limited interpretability, and degraded disturbance rejection under unseen perturbations. In this work, we present a novel hybrid framework that adaptively fine-tunes model predictive control (MPC) parameters online using outputs from a neural network (NN) trained offline. The NN jointly predicts a reference pose and cost function weights, conditioned on the coordinates of the gate corners and the current drone state. To achieve efficient training, we derive analytical policy gradients not only for the MPC module but also for an optimization-based gate traversal detection module. Hardware experiments demonstrate agile and accurate gate traversal with peak accelerations of $30\ \mathrm{m/s^2}$, as well as recovery within $0.85\ \mathrm{s}$ following body-rate disturbances exceeding $1146\ \mathrm{deg/s}$.