Traditional controllers are designed for specific systems and do not transfer across different system orders and dynamics. We present a Generalist Controller, a learning-based controller capable of controlling systems of varying orders and dynamics. The approach introduces a novel dynamic state-space representation using attention mechanisms with masking, enabling a single neural network, trained in one shot, to handle systems with different dimensions without architectural modifications by assigning a system tag to each system. We generated 314,630 demonstrations from 25 diverse systems, including stable, unstable, minimum-phase, and non-minimum-phase dynamics, spanning linear and nonlinear systems from autonomous underwater and aerospace vehicles to mechanical systems and chemical processes. The model learns cross-system control strategies through multi-scale temporal processing and a mixture-of-experts architecture. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed generalist controller achieves comparable performance to system-specific LQI controllers across all tested systems, including challenging cases such as non-minimum-phase and unstable dynamics, whilst generalising to unseen operating conditions including actuator saturation, noise, disturbance, and reference trajectories not encountered during training. This work represents a significant step towards generalist control policies within a defined family of dynamical systems, demonstrating effective control across a range of single-input single-output (SISO) systems of varying order and dynamics using a single learned policy without system-specific tuning.
We present a generalist position control policy capable of controlling arbitrary multirotor configurations of a certain rotor count (e.g., hexarotors or quadrotors) with a single set of network weights. The policy is conditioned on a physics-grounded embodiment descriptor: a mass and inertia-normalized control allocation matrix that captures how mass-normalized motor thrusts generate linear and angular accelerations in the body-frame. To train the policy, we sample from a broad distribution of arbitrary multirotor configurations, including non-planar and asymmetric systems, and optimize a single, compact network using Proximal Policy Optimization. Training requires only five minutes on an RTX 3090 GPU using a custom NVIDIA Warp-based dynamics simulator. Through extensive simulation experiments, we show that embodiment conditioning enables robust generalist control across arbitrary morphologies. We demonstrate zero-shot real-world transfer of this generalist policy on three diverse hexarotor systems, including a planar robot, a partially symmetric non-planar system, and a random asymmetric, non-planar configuration.