3,985 research outputs found
Task-Driven Estimation and Control via Information Bottlenecks
Our goal is to develop a principled and general algorithmic framework for
task-driven estimation and control for robotic systems. State-of-the-art
approaches for controlling robotic systems typically rely heavily on accurately
estimating the full state of the robot (e.g., a running robot might estimate
joint angles and velocities, torso state, and position relative to a goal).
However, full state representations are often excessively rich for the specific
task at hand and can lead to significant computational inefficiency and
brittleness to errors in state estimation. In contrast, we present an approach
that eschews such rich representations and seeks to create task-driven
representations. The key technical insight is to leverage the theory of
information bottlenecks}to formalize the notion of a "task-driven
representation" in terms of information theoretic quantities that measure the
minimality of a representation. We propose novel iterative algorithms for
automatically synthesizing (offline) a task-driven representation (given in
terms of a set of task-relevant variables (TRVs)) and a performant control
policy that is a function of the TRVs. We present online algorithms for
estimating the TRVs in order to apply the control policy. We demonstrate that
our approach results in significant robustness to unmodeled measurement
uncertainty both theoretically and via thorough simulation experiments
including a spring-loaded inverted pendulum running to a goal location.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, abridged version accepted to ICRA2019;
Incorporates changes in final conference submissio
Bayesian Nonparametric Adaptive Control using Gaussian Processes
This technical report is a preprint of an article submitted to a journal.Most current Model Reference Adaptive Control
(MRAC) methods rely on parametric adaptive elements, in
which the number of parameters of the adaptive element are
fixed a priori, often through expert judgment. An example of
such an adaptive element are Radial Basis Function Networks
(RBFNs), with RBF centers pre-allocated based on the expected
operating domain. If the system operates outside of the expected
operating domain, this adaptive element can become
non-effective in capturing and canceling the uncertainty, thus
rendering the adaptive controller only semi-global in nature.
This paper investigates a Gaussian Process (GP) based Bayesian
MRAC architecture (GP-MRAC), which leverages the power and
flexibility of GP Bayesian nonparametric models of uncertainty.
GP-MRAC does not require the centers to be preallocated, can
inherently handle measurement noise, and enables MRAC to
handle a broader set of uncertainties, including those that are
defined as distributions over functions. We use stochastic stability
arguments to show that GP-MRAC guarantees good closed loop
performance with no prior domain knowledge of the uncertainty.
Online implementable GP inference methods are compared in
numerical simulations against RBFN-MRAC with preallocated
centers and are shown to provide better tracking and improved
long-term learning.This research was supported in part by ONR MURI Grant
N000141110688 and NSF grant ECS #0846750
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