  This paper considers optimal control of dynamical systems which are
represented by nonlinear stochastic differential equations. It is well-known
that the optimal control policy for this problem can be obtained as a function
of a value function that satisfies a nonlinear partial differential equation,
namely, the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. This nonlinear PDE must be solved
backwards in time, and this computation is intractable for large scale systems.
Under certain assumptions, and after applying a logarithmic transformation, an
alternative characterization of the optimal policy can be given in terms of a
path integral. Path Integral (PI) based control methods have recently been
shown to provide elegant solutions to a broad class of stochastic optimal
control problems. One of the implementation challenges with this formalism is
the computation of the expectation of a cost functional over the trajectories
of the unforced dynamics. Computing such expectation over trajectories that are
sampled uniformly may induce numerical instabilities due to the exponentiation
of the cost. Therefore, sampling of low-cost trajectories is essential for the
practical implementation of PI-based methods. In this paper, we use incremental
sampling-based algorithms to sample useful trajectories from the unforced
system dynamics, and make a novel connection between Rapidly-exploring Random
Trees (RRTs) and information-theoretic stochastic optimal control. We show the
results from the numerical implementation of the proposed approach to several
examples.
