3,792 research outputs found
Multiple chaotic central pattern generators with learning for legged locomotion and malfunction compensation
An originally chaotic system can be controlled into various periodic
dynamics. When it is implemented into a legged robot's locomotion control as a
central pattern generator (CPG), sophisticated gait patterns arise so that the
robot can perform various walking behaviors. However, such a single chaotic CPG
controller has difficulties dealing with leg malfunction. Specifically, in the
scenarios presented here, its movement permanently deviates from the desired
trajectory. To address this problem, we extend the single chaotic CPG to
multiple CPGs with learning. The learning mechanism is based on a simulated
annealing algorithm. In a normal situation, the CPGs synchronize and their
dynamics are identical. With leg malfunction or disability, the CPGs lose
synchronization leading to independent dynamics. In this case, the learning
mechanism is applied to automatically adjust the remaining legs' oscillation
frequencies so that the robot adapts its locomotion to deal with the
malfunction. As a consequence, the trajectory produced by the multiple chaotic
CPGs resembles the original trajectory far better than the one produced by only
a single CPG. The performance of the system is evaluated first in a physical
simulation of a quadruped as well as a hexapod robot and finally in a real
six-legged walking machine called AMOSII. The experimental results presented
here reveal that using multiple CPGs with learning is an effective approach for
adaptive locomotion generation where, for instance, different body parts have
to perform independent movements for malfunction compensation.Comment: 48 pages, 16 figures, Information Sciences 201
A silicon implementation of the fly's optomotor control system
Flies are capable of stabilizing their body during free flight by using visual motion information to estimate self-rotation. We have built a hardware model of this optomotor control system in a standard CMOS VLSI process. The result is a small, low-power chip that receives input directly from the real world through on-board photoreceptors and generates motor commands in real time. The chip was tested under closed-loop conditions typically used for insect studies. The silicon system exhibited stable control sufficiently analogous to the biological system to allow for quantitative comparisons
Development of c-means Clustering Based Adaptive Fuzzy Controller for A Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle
Advanced and accurate modelling of a Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle (FW MAV)
and its control is one of the recent research topics related to the field of
autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In this work, a four wing
Natureinspired (NI) FW MAV is modeled and controlled inspiring by its advanced
features like quick flight, vertical take-off and landing, hovering, and fast
turn, and enhanced manoeuvrability when contrasted with comparable-sized fixed
and rotary wing UAVs. The Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering algorithm is utilized
to demonstrate the NIFW MAV model, which has points of interest over first
principle based modelling since it does not depend on the system dynamics,
rather based on data and can incorporate various uncertainties like sensor
error. The same clustering strategy is used to develop an adaptive fuzzy
controller. The controller is then utilized to control the altitude of the NIFW
MAV, that can adapt with environmental disturbances by tuning the antecedent
and consequent parameters of the fuzzy system.Comment: this paper is currently under review in Journal of Artificial
Intelligence and Soft Computing Researc
Efficient Deep Learning of Robust, Adaptive Policies using Tube MPC-Guided Data Augmentation
The deployment of agile autonomous systems in challenging, unstructured
environments requires adaptation capabilities and robustness to uncertainties.
Existing robust and adaptive controllers, such as the ones based on MPC, can
achieve impressive performance at the cost of heavy online onboard
computations. Strategies that efficiently learn robust and onboard-deployable
policies from MPC have emerged, but they still lack fundamental adaptation
capabilities. In this work, we extend an existing efficient IL algorithm for
robust policy learning from MPC with the ability to learn policies that adapt
to challenging model/environment uncertainties. The key idea of our approach
consists in modifying the IL procedure by conditioning the policy on a learned
lower-dimensional model/environment representation that can be efficiently
estimated online. We tailor our approach to the task of learning an adaptive
position and attitude control policy to track trajectories under challenging
disturbances on a multirotor. Our evaluation is performed in a high-fidelity
simulation environment and shows that a high-quality adaptive policy can be
obtained in about hours. We additionally empirically demonstrate rapid
adaptation to in- and out-of-training-distribution uncertainties, achieving a
cm average position error under a wind disturbance that corresponds to
about of the weight of the robot and that is larger than the
maximum wind seen during training.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure
DESIGN AND CONTROL OF A HUMMINGBIRD-SIZE FLAPPING WING MICRO AERIAL VEHICLE
Flying animals with flapping wings may best exemplify the astonishing ability of natural selection on design optimization. They evince extraordinary prowess to control their flight, while demonstrating rich repertoire of agile maneuvers. They remain surprisingly stable during hover and can make sharp turns in a split second. Characterized by high-frequency flapping wing motion, unsteady aerodynamics, and the ability to hover and perform fast maneuvers, insect-like flapping flight presents an extraordinary aerial locomotion strategy perfected at small size scales. Flapping Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (FWMAVs) hold great promise in bridging the performance gap between engineered flying vehicles and their natural counterparts. They are perfect candidates for potential applications such as fast response robots in search and rescue, environmental friendly agents in precision agriculture, surveillance and intelligence gathering MAVs, and miniature nodes in sensor networks
Fast Damage Recovery in Robotics with the T-Resilience Algorithm
Damage recovery is critical for autonomous robots that need to operate for a
long time without assistance. Most current methods are complex and costly
because they require anticipating each potential damage in order to have a
contingency plan ready. As an alternative, we introduce the T-resilience
algorithm, a new algorithm that allows robots to quickly and autonomously
discover compensatory behaviors in unanticipated situations. This algorithm
equips the robot with a self-model and discovers new behaviors by learning to
avoid those that perform differently in the self-model and in reality. Our
algorithm thus does not identify the damaged parts but it implicitly searches
for efficient behaviors that do not use them. We evaluate the T-Resilience
algorithm on a hexapod robot that needs to adapt to leg removal, broken legs
and motor failures; we compare it to stochastic local search, policy gradient
and the self-modeling algorithm proposed by Bongard et al. The behavior of the
robot is assessed on-board thanks to a RGB-D sensor and a SLAM algorithm. Using
only 25 tests on the robot and an overall running time of 20 minutes,
T-Resilience consistently leads to substantially better results than the other
approaches
Robots that can adapt like animals
As robots leave the controlled environments of factories to autonomously
function in more complex, natural environments, they will have to respond to
the inevitable fact that they will become damaged. However, while animals can
quickly adapt to a wide variety of injuries, current robots cannot "think
outside the box" to find a compensatory behavior when damaged: they are limited
to their pre-specified self-sensing abilities, can diagnose only anticipated
failure modes, and require a pre-programmed contingency plan for every type of
potential damage, an impracticality for complex robots. Here we introduce an
intelligent trial and error algorithm that allows robots to adapt to damage in
less than two minutes, without requiring self-diagnosis or pre-specified
contingency plans. Before deployment, a robot exploits a novel algorithm to
create a detailed map of the space of high-performing behaviors: This map
represents the robot's intuitions about what behaviors it can perform and their
value. If the robot is damaged, it uses these intuitions to guide a
trial-and-error learning algorithm that conducts intelligent experiments to
rapidly discover a compensatory behavior that works in spite of the damage.
Experiments reveal successful adaptations for a legged robot injured in five
different ways, including damaged, broken, and missing legs, and for a robotic
arm with joints broken in 14 different ways. This new technique will enable
more robust, effective, autonomous robots, and suggests principles that animals
may use to adapt to injury
Scalable Co-Optimization of Morphology and Control in Embodied Machines
Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together
over time. In contrast, in AI and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually
designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that fixed
design. The task of simultaneously co-optimizing the morphology and controller
of an embodied robot has remained a challenge. In psychology, the theory of
embodied cognition posits that behavior arises from a close coupling between
body plan and sensorimotor control, which suggests why co-optimizing these two
subsystems is so difficult: most evolutionary changes to morphology tend to
adversely impact sensorimotor control, leading to an overall decrease in
behavioral performance. Here, we further examine this hypothesis and
demonstrate a technique for "morphological innovation protection", which
temporarily reduces selection pressure on recently morphologically-changed
individuals, thus enabling evolution some time to "readapt" to the new
morphology with subsequent control policy mutations. We show the potential for
this method to avoid local optima and converge to similar highly fit
morphologies across widely varying initial conditions, while sustaining fitness
improvements further into optimization. While this technique is admittedly only
the first of many steps that must be taken to achieve scalable optimization of
embodied machines, we hope that theoretical insight into the cause of
evolutionary stagnation in current methods will help to enable the automation
of robot design and behavioral training -- while simultaneously providing a
testbed to investigate the theory of embodied cognition
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