1,211 research outputs found
Deep Visual Foresight for Planning Robot Motion
A key challenge in scaling up robot learning to many skills and environments
is removing the need for human supervision, so that robots can collect their
own data and improve their own performance without being limited by the cost of
requesting human feedback. Model-based reinforcement learning holds the promise
of enabling an agent to learn to predict the effects of its actions, which
could provide flexible predictive models for a wide range of tasks and
environments, without detailed human supervision. We develop a method for
combining deep action-conditioned video prediction models with model-predictive
control that uses entirely unlabeled training data. Our approach does not
require a calibrated camera, an instrumented training set-up, nor precise
sensing and actuation. Our results show that our method enables a real robot to
perform nonprehensile manipulation -- pushing objects -- and can handle novel
objects not seen during training.Comment: ICRA 2017. Supplementary video:
https://sites.google.com/site/robotforesight
Safe Multi-Agent Interaction through Robust Control Barrier Functions with Learned Uncertainties
Robots operating in real world settings must navigate and maintain safety while interacting with many heterogeneous agents and obstacles. Multi-Agent Control Barrier Functions (CBF) have emerged as a computationally efficient tool to guarantee safety in multi-agent environments, but they assume perfect knowledge of both the robot dynamics and other agents' dynamics. While knowledge of the robot's dynamics might be reasonably well known, the heterogeneity of agents in real-world environments means there will always be considerable uncertainty in our prediction of other agents' dynamics. This work aims to learn high-confidence bounds for these dynamic uncertainties using Matrix-Variate Gaussian Process models, and incorporates them into a robust multi-agent CBF framework. We transform the resulting min-max robust CBF into a quadratic program, which can be efficiently solved in real time. We verify via simulation results that the nominal multi-agent CBF is often violated during agent interactions, whereas our robust formulation maintains safety with a much higher probability and adapts to learned uncertainties
Model-Based Policy Search for Automatic Tuning of Multivariate PID Controllers
PID control architectures are widely used in industrial applications. Despite
their low number of open parameters, tuning multiple, coupled PID controllers
can become tedious in practice. In this paper, we extend PILCO, a model-based
policy search framework, to automatically tune multivariate PID controllers
purely based on data observed on an otherwise unknown system. The system's
state is extended appropriately to frame the PID policy as a static state
feedback policy. This renders PID tuning possible as the solution of a finite
horizon optimal control problem without further a priori knowledge. The
framework is applied to the task of balancing an inverted pendulum on a seven
degree-of-freedom robotic arm, thereby demonstrating its capabilities of fast
and data-efficient policy learning, even on complex real world problems.Comment: Accepted final version to appear in 2017 IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA
Challenges and Solutions for Autonomous Robotic Mobile Manipulation for Outdoor Sample Collection
In refinery, petrochemical, and chemical plants, process technicians collect uncontaminated samples to be analyzed in the quality control laboratory all time and all weather. This traditionally manual operation not only exposes the process technicians to hazardous chemicals, but also imposes an economical burden on the management. The recent development in mobile manipulation provides an opportunity to fully automate the operation of sample collection. This paper reviewed the various challenges in sample collection in terms of navigation of the mobile platform and manipulation of the robotic arm from four aspects, namely mobile robot positioning/attitude using global navigation satellite system (GNSS), vision-based navigation and visual servoing, robotic manipulation, mobile robot path planning and control. This paper further proposed solutions to these challenges and pointed the main direction of development in mobile manipulation
An L₁-Norm Based Optimization Method for Sparse Redundancy Resolution of Robotic Manipulators
For targeted motion control tasks of manipulators, it is frequently necessary to make use of full levels of joint actuation to guarantee successful motion planning and path tracking. Such way of motion planning and control may keep the joint actuation in a non-sparse manner during motion control process. In order to improve sparsity of joint actuation for manipulator systems, a novel motion planning scheme which can optimally and sparsely adopt joint actuation is proposed in this paper. The proposed motion planning strategy is formulated as a constrained L1 norm optimization problem, and an equivalent enhanced optimization solution dealing with bounded joint velocity is proposed as well. A new primal dual neural network with a new solution set division is further proposed and applied to solve such bounded optimization which can sparsely adopt joint actuation for motion control. Simulation and experiment results demonstrate the efficiency, accuracy and superiority of the proposed method for optimally and sparsely adopting joint actuation. The average sparsity (i.e., -||˙θ||p where θ denotes the joint angle) of the joint motion of the manipulator can be increased by 39.22% and 51.30% for path tracking tasks in X-Y and X-Z planes respectively, indicating that the sparsity of joint actuation can be enhanced
Identification of robotic manipulators' inverse dynamics coefficients via model-based adaptive networks
The values of a given manipulator's dynamics coefficients need to be accurately
identified in order to employ model-based algorithms in the control of its motion. This
thesis details the development of a novel form of adaptive network which is capable of
accurately learning the coefficients of systems, such as manipulator inverse dynamics,
where the algebraic form is known but the coefficients' values are not. Empirical motion
data from a pair of PUMA 560s has been processed by the Context-Sensitive Linear
Combiner (CSLC) network developed, and the coefficients of their inverse dynamics
identified. The resultant precision of control is shown to be superior to that achieved from
employing dynamics coefficients derived from direct measurement.
As part of the development of the CSLC network, the process of network learning is
examined. This analysis reveals that current network architectures for processing analogue
output systems with high input order are highly unlikely to produce solutions that are
good estimates throughout the entire problem space. In contrast, the CSLC network is
shown to generalise intrinsically as a result of its structure, whilst its training is greatly
simplified by the presence of only one minima in the network's error hypersurface.
Furthermore, a fine-tuning algorithm for network training is presented which takes
advantage of the CSLC network's single adaptive layer structure and does not rely upon
gradient descent of the network error hypersurface, which commonly slows the later
stages of network training
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