130 research outputs found
Adaptive swing-up and balancing control of acrobot systems
Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 22).The field of underactuated robotics has become the core of agile mobile robotics research. Significant past effort has been put into understanding the swing-up control of the acrobot system. This thesis implements an online, adaptive swing-up and balancing controller with no previous knowledge of the system's mass or geometric parameters. A least squares method is used to identify the 5 parameters necessary to completely characterize acrobot dynamics. Swing up is accomplished using partial feedback linearization and a pump up strategy to add energy to the system. The controller then catches the swung up system in the basin of attraction of an LQR controller computed using the estimated parameter values generated from online system identification. These results are then simulated using a MATLAB simulation environment.by Luke B. Johnson.S.B
MATLAB-based Tools for Modelling and Control of Underactuated Mechanical Systems
Underactuated systems, defined as nonlinear mechanical systems with fewer control inputs than degrees of freedom, appear in a broad range of applications including robotics, aerospace, marine and locomotive systems. Studying the complex low-order nonlinear dynamics of appropriate benchmark underactuated systems often enables us to gain insight into the principles of modelling and control of advanced, higher-order underactuated systems. Such benchmarks include the Acrobot, Pendubot and the reaction (inertia) wheel pendulum. The aim of this paper is to introduce novel MATLAB-based tools which were developed to provide complex software support for modelling and control of these three benchmark systems. The presented tools include a Simulink block library, a set of demo simulation schemes and several innovative functions for mathematical and simulation model generation
Polynomial mechanics and optimal control
We describe a new algorithm for trajectory optimization of mechanical
systems. Our method combines pseudo-spectral methods for function approximation
with variational discretization schemes that exactly preserve conserved
mechanical quantities such as momentum. We thus obtain a global discretization
of the Lagrange-d'Alembert variational principle using pseudo-spectral methods.
Our proposed scheme inherits the numerical convergence characteristics of
spectral methods, yet preserves momentum-conservation and symplecticity after
discretization. We compare this algorithm against two other established methods
for two examples of underactuated mechanical systems; minimum-effort swing-up
of a two-link and a three-link acrobot.Comment: Final version to EC
Normal forms for underactuated mechanical systems with symmetry
We introduce cascade normal forms for underactuated mechanical systems that are convenient for control design. These normal forms include three classes of cascade systems, namely, nonlinear systems in strict feedback form, feedforward form, and nontriangular quadratic form (to be defined). In each case, the transformation to cascade systems is provided in closed-form. We apply our results to the Acrobot, the rotating pendulum, and the cart-pole system
Empowerment for Continuous Agent-Environment Systems
This paper develops generalizations of empowerment to continuous states.
Empowerment is a recently introduced information-theoretic quantity motivated
by hypotheses about the efficiency of the sensorimotor loop in biological
organisms, but also from considerations stemming from curiosity-driven
learning. Empowemerment measures, for agent-environment systems with stochastic
transitions, how much influence an agent has on its environment, but only that
influence that can be sensed by the agent sensors. It is an
information-theoretic generalization of joint controllability (influence on
environment) and observability (measurement by sensors) of the environment by
the agent, both controllability and observability being usually defined in
control theory as the dimensionality of the control/observation spaces. Earlier
work has shown that empowerment has various interesting and relevant
properties, e.g., it allows us to identify salient states using only the
dynamics, and it can act as intrinsic reward without requiring an external
reward. However, in this previous work empowerment was limited to the case of
small-scale and discrete domains and furthermore state transition probabilities
were assumed to be known. The goal of this paper is to extend empowerment to
the significantly more important and relevant case of continuous vector-valued
state spaces and initially unknown state transition probabilities. The
continuous state space is addressed by Monte-Carlo approximation; the unknown
transitions are addressed by model learning and prediction for which we apply
Gaussian processes regression with iterated forecasting. In a number of
well-known continuous control tasks we examine the dynamics induced by
empowerment and include an application to exploration and online model
learning
Benchmarking Deep Reinforcement Learning for Continuous Control
Recently, researchers have made significant progress combining the advances
in deep learning for learning feature representations with reinforcement
learning. Some notable examples include training agents to play Atari games
based on raw pixel data and to acquire advanced manipulation skills using raw
sensory inputs. However, it has been difficult to quantify progress in the
domain of continuous control due to the lack of a commonly adopted benchmark.
In this work, we present a benchmark suite of continuous control tasks,
including classic tasks like cart-pole swing-up, tasks with very high state and
action dimensionality such as 3D humanoid locomotion, tasks with partial
observations, and tasks with hierarchical structure. We report novel findings
based on the systematic evaluation of a range of implemented reinforcement
learning algorithms. Both the benchmark and reference implementations are
released at https://github.com/rllab/rllab in order to facilitate experimental
reproducibility and to encourage adoption by other researchers.Comment: 14 pages, ICML 201
Producing Periodic Motion for Underactuated Systems
This project considers a special class of aero-dynamics of two different underactuated systems. The two systems under consideration are the Pendubot (actuator at the hip) and the Acrobot (actuator at the knee). The main objectives are to show stability and periodicity of the two systems. The next step is to change the zero-dynamics such that resulting periodic orbits produce walking gait patterns. The stability analysis involves searching for a Lyapunov function which would prove stability and in turn, as can be shown, imply periodicty. The Lyapunov function would also be a powerful help in knowing how to change the zero-dynamics so that desired motions are obtained. However, a Lyapunov function could not be found, which implies that the succeeding steps are hard to make. We present in this work some conclusions that would follow from a Lyapunov function and highlight some properties of the systems. We also show how the Pendubot could be brought to upright position
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