6,630 research outputs found
A Quantitative Method for Comparing Trajectories of Mobile Robots Using Point Distribution Models
The need for efficient security systems led to the development of automatic behavioral identification tools using video tracking. However, in the field of mobile robotics, trajectories are seldom taken into account to qualify robot behavior. Most metrics rely mainly on the time to accomplish a given task or on a prior knowledge of the robot controller, with the assumption that the trajectory can be kept within a maximal bounding error. A trajectory analysis method based on a Point Distribution Model (PDM) is presented here. The applicability of this method is demonstrated on the trajectories of a real differential-drive robot, endowed with two different controllers which lead to different patterns of motion. Results demonstrate that in the space of the PDM, the difference between the two controllers can be easily quantified. This method applies equally well to the trajectories gathered in real world experiments as to those generated in a corresponding realistic simulation. Quantitative comparison between these results (real and simulated) affords an assessment of the simulation quality, when simulation features are appropriately tuned
Accurate robot simulation through system identification
Robot simulators are useful tools for developing robot behaviours. They provide a fast and efficient means to test robot control code at the convenience of the office
desk. In all but the simplest cases though, due to the complexities of the physical systems modelled in the simulator, there are considerable differences between the
behaviour of the robot in the simulator and that in the real world environment. In this paper we present a novel method to create a robot simulator using real sensor data. Logged sensor data is used to construct a mathematically explicit model(in the form of a NARMAX polynomial) of the robot’s environment. The advantage of such a transparent model — in contrast to opaque modelling methods such as
artificial neural networks — is that it can be analysed to characterise the modelled system, using established mathematical methods In this paper we compare the behaviour of the robot running a particular task in
both the simulator and the real-world using qualitative and quantitative measures including statistical methods to investigate the faithfulness of the simulator
Goal-Directed Planning for Habituated Agents by Active Inference Using a Variational Recurrent Neural Network
It is crucial to ask how agents can achieve goals by generating action plans
using only partial models of the world acquired through habituated
sensory-motor experiences. Although many existing robotics studies use a
forward model framework, there are generalization issues with high degrees of
freedom. The current study shows that the predictive coding (PC) and active
inference (AIF) frameworks, which employ a generative model, can develop better
generalization by learning a prior distribution in a low dimensional latent
state space representing probabilistic structures extracted from well
habituated sensory-motor trajectories. In our proposed model, learning is
carried out by inferring optimal latent variables as well as synaptic weights
for maximizing the evidence lower bound, while goal-directed planning is
accomplished by inferring latent variables for maximizing the estimated lower
bound. Our proposed model was evaluated with both simple and complex robotic
tasks in simulation, which demonstrated sufficient generalization in learning
with limited training data by setting an intermediate value for a
regularization coefficient. Furthermore, comparative simulation results show
that the proposed model outperforms a conventional forward model in
goal-directed planning, due to the learned prior confining the search of motor
plans within the range of habituated trajectories.Comment: 30 pages, 19 figure
Human Motion Trajectory Prediction: A Survey
With growing numbers of intelligent autonomous systems in human environments,
the ability of such systems to perceive, understand and anticipate human
behavior becomes increasingly important. Specifically, predicting future
positions of dynamic agents and planning considering such predictions are key
tasks for self-driving vehicles, service robots and advanced surveillance
systems. This paper provides a survey of human motion trajectory prediction. We
review, analyze and structure a large selection of work from different
communities and propose a taxonomy that categorizes existing methods based on
the motion modeling approach and level of contextual information used. We
provide an overview of the existing datasets and performance metrics. We
discuss limitations of the state of the art and outline directions for further
research.Comment: Submitted to the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR),
37 page
Probabilistic Human Mobility Model in Indoor Environment
Understanding human mobility is important for the development of intelligent
mobile service robots as it can provide prior knowledge and predictions of
human distribution for robot-assisted activities. In this paper, we propose a
probabilistic method to model human motion behaviors which is determined by
both internal and external factors in an indoor environment. While the internal
factors are represented by the individual preferences, aims and interests, the
external factors are indicated by the stimulation of the environment. We model
the randomness of human macro-level movement, e.g., the probability of visiting
a specific place and staying time, under the Bayesian framework, considering
the influence of both internal and external variables. We use two case studies
in a shopping mall and in a college student dorm building to show the
effectiveness of our proposed probabilistic human mobility model. Real
surveillance camera data are used to validate the proposed model together with
survey data in the case study of student dorm.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figures, International Joint Conference on Neural Networks
(IJCNN) 201
Using Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations to Scale Up the Multi-dimensional Archive of Phenotypic Elites Algorithm
The recently introduced Multi-dimensional Archive of Phenotypic Elites
(MAP-Elites) is an evolutionary algorithm capable of producing a large archive
of diverse, high-performing solutions in a single run. It works by discretizing
a continuous feature space into unique regions according to the desired
discretization per dimension. While simple, this algorithm has a main drawback:
it cannot scale to high-dimensional feature spaces since the number of regions
increase exponentially with the number of dimensions. In this paper, we address
this limitation by introducing a simple extension of MAP-Elites that has a
constant, pre-defined number of regions irrespective of the dimensionality of
the feature space. Our main insight is that methods from computational geometry
could partition a high-dimensional space into well-spread geometric regions. In
particular, our algorithm uses a centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CVT) to
divide the feature space into a desired number of regions; it then places every
generated individual in its closest region, replacing a less fit one if the
region is already occupied. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the new
"CVT-MAP-Elites" algorithm in high-dimensional feature spaces through
comparisons against MAP-Elites in maze navigation and hexapod locomotion tasks
Modelling Locomotor Control: the advantages of mobile gaze
In 1958, JJ Gibson put forward proposals on the visual control of locomotion. Research in the last 50 years has served to clarify the sources of visual and nonvisual information that contribute to successful steering, but has yet to determine how this information is optimally combined under conditions of uncertainty. Here, we test the conditions under which a locomotor robot with a mobile camera can steer effectively using simple visual and extra-retinal parameters to examine how such models cope with the noisy real-world visual and motor estimates that are available to humans. This applied modeling gives us an insight into both the advantages and limitations of using active gaze to sample information when steering
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