For general purpose they're similar in principle.
A computer program might decide when to fire up the boiler that heats a building's water. The goal is to maintain a certain temperature, and the heat must be on a certain amount of time to make the temperature rise. Such a system can be programmed to learn (through a number of cycles) how to time On-Off periods so that the boiler doesn't get overly hot or cool.
Is that the sort of thing your question is about? The digital system has a control loop, and learns. I'm not certain about it being a reinforcement learning algorithm. There's Hexapawn Educable Robot (invented by Martin Gardner), where you reinforce it to play an unbeatable game, by removing the token representing its previous losing move, and when it wins you add a token representing its previous move. In other words, rewarding and punishing to instill reinforcement learning.