Evolvability signatures of generative encodings: beyond standard performance benchmarks

Evolutionary robotics is a promising approach to autonomously synthesize machines with abilities that resemble those of animals, but the field suffers from a lack of strong foundations. In particular, evolutionary systems are currently assessed solely by the fitness score their evolved artifacts can achieve for a specific task, whereas such fitness-based comparisons provide limited insights about how the same system would evaluate on different tasks, and its adaptive capabilities to respond to changes in fitness (e.g., from damages to the machine, or in new situations). To counter these limitations, we introduce the concept of "evolvability signatures", which picture the post-mutation statistical distribution of both behavior diversity (how different are the robot behaviors after a mutation?) and fitness values (how different is the fitness after a mutation?). We tested the relevance of this concept by evolving controllers for hexapod robot locomotion using five different genotype-to-phenotype mappings (direct encoding, generative encoding of open-loop and closed-loop central pattern generators, generative encoding of neural networks, and single-unit pattern generators (SUPG)). We observed a predictive relationship between the evolvability signature of each encoding and the number of generations required by hexapods to adapt from incurred damages. Our study also reveals that, across the five investigated encodings, the SUPG scheme achieved the best evolvability signature, and was always foremost in recovering an effective gait following robot damages. Overall, our evolvability signatures neatly complement existing task-performance benchmarks, and pave the way for stronger foundations for research in evolutionary robotics.Comment: 24 pages with 12 figures in the main text, and 4 supplementary figures. Accepted at Information Sciences journal (in press). Supplemental videos are available online at, see http://goo.gl/uyY1R

In silico case studies of compliant robots: AMARSI deliverable 3.3

In the deliverable 3.2 we presented how the morphological computing ap- proach can significantly facilitate the control strategy in several scenarios, e.g. quadruped locomotion, bipedal locomotion and reaching. In particular, the Kitty experimental platform is an example of the use of morphological computation to allow quadruped locomotion. In this deliverable we continue with the simulation studies on the application of the different morphological computation strategies to control a robotic system

Motion Planning and Control of Dynamic Humanoid Locomotion

Inspired by human, humanoid robots has the potential to become a general-purpose platform that lives along with human. Due to the technological advances in many field, such as actuation, sensing, control and intelligence, it finally enables humanoid robots to possess human comparable capabilities. However, humanoid locomotion is still a challenging research field. The large number of degree of freedom structure makes the system difficult to coordinate online. The presence of various contact constraints and the hybrid nature of locomotion tasks make the planning a harder problem to solve. Template model anchoring approach has been adopted to bridge the gap between simple model behavior and the whole-body motion of humanoid robot. Control policies are first developed for simple template models like Linear Inverted Pendulum Model (LIPM) or Spring Loaded Inverted Pendulum(SLIP), the result controlled behaviors are then been mapped to the whole-body motion of humanoid robot through optimization-based task-space control strategies. Whole-body humanoid control framework has been verified on various contact situations such as unknown uneven terrain, multi-contact scenarios and moving platform and shows its generality and versatility. For walking motion, existing Model Predictive Control approach based on LIPM has been extended to enable the robot to walk without any reference foot placement anchoring. It is kind of discrete version of \u201cwalking without thinking\u201d. As a result, the robot could achieve versatile locomotion modes such as automatic foot placement with single reference velocity command, reactive stepping under large external disturbances, guided walking with small constant external pushing forces, robust walking on unknown uneven terrain, reactive stepping in place when blocked by external barrier. As an extension of this proposed framework, also to increase the push recovery capability of the humanoid robot, two new configurations have been proposed to enable the robot to perform cross-step motions. For more dynamic hopping and running motion, SLIP model has been chosen as the template model. Different from traditional model-based analytical approach, a data-driven approach has been proposed to encode the dynamics of the this model. A deep neural network is trained offline with a large amount of simulation data based on the SLIP model to learn its dynamics. The trained network is applied online to generate reference foot placements for the humanoid robot. Simulations have been performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in generating bio-inspired and robust running motions. The method proposed based on 2D SLIP model can be generalized to 3D SLIP model and the extension has been briefly mentioned at the end

Streamlined sim-to-real transfer for deep-reinforcement learning in robotics locomotion

Legged robots possess superior mobility compared to other machines, yet designing controllers for them can be challenging. Classic control methods require engineers to distill their knowledge into controllers, which is time-consuming and limiting when approaching dynamic tasks in unknown environments. Conversely, learning- based methods that gather knowledge from data can potentially unlock the versatility of legged systems. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach called CPG-Actor, which incor- porates feedback into a fully differentiable Central Pattern Generator (CPG) formulation using neural networks and Deep-Reinforcement Learning (RL). This approach achieves approximately twenty times better training performance compared to previous methods and provides insights into the impact of training on the distribution of parameters in both the CPGs and MLP feedback network. Adopting Deep-RL to design controllers comes at the expense of gathering extensive data, typically done in simulation to reduce time. However, controllers trained with data collected in simulation often lose performance when deployed in the real world, referred to as the sim-to-real gap. To address this, we propose a new method called Extended Random Force Injection (ERFI), which randomizes only two parameters to allow for sim-to-real transfer of locomotion controllers. ERFI demonstrated high robustness when varying masses of the base, or attaching a manipulator arm to the robot during testing, and achieved competitive performance comparable to standard randomization techniques. Furthermore, we propose a new method called Roll-Drop to enhance the robustness of Deep-RL policies to observation noise. Roll-Drop introduces dropout during rollout, achieving an 80% success rate when tested with up to 25% noise injected in the observations. Finally, we adopted model-free controllers to enable omni-directional bipedal lo- comotion on point feet with a quadruped robot without any hardware modification or external support. Despite the limitations posed by the quadruped’s hardware, the study considers this a perfect benchmark task to assess the shortcomings of sim- to-real techniques and unlock future avenues for the legged robotics community. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the potential of learning-based methods to design dynamic and robust controllers for legged robots while limiting the effort needed for sim-to-real transfer

A review of gait optimization based on evolutionary computation

Gait generation is very important as it directly affects the quality of locomotion of legged robots. As this is an optimization problem with constraints, it readily lends itself to Evolutionary Computation methods and solutions. This paper reviews the techniques used in evolution-based gait optimization, including why Evolutionary Computation techniques should be used, how fitness functions should be composed, and the selection of genetic operators and control parameters. This paper also addresses further possible improvements in the efficiency and quality of evolutionary gait optimization, some problems that have not yet been resolved and the perspectives for related future research