  The goal of this paper is to present a method for simultaneous trajectory and
local stabilizing policy optimization to generate local policies for
trajectory-centric model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL). This is motivated
by the fact that global policy optimization for non-linear systems could be a
very challenging problem both algorithmically and numerically. However, a lot
of robotic manipulation tasks are trajectory-centric, and thus do not require a
global model or policy. Due to inaccuracies in the learned model estimates, an
open-loop trajectory optimization process mostly results in very poor
performance when used on the real system. Motivated by these problems, we try
to formulate the problem of trajectory optimization and local policy synthesis
as a single optimization problem. It is then solved simultaneously as an
instance of nonlinear programming. We provide some results for analysis as well
as achieved performance of the proposed technique under some simplifying
assumptions.
