Adaptive neural network control of a robotic manipulator with unknown backlash-like hysteresis

This study proposes an adaptive neural network controller for a 3-DOF robotic manipulator that is subject to backlashlike hysteresis and friction. Two neural networks are used to approximate the dynamics and the hysteresis non-linearity. A neural network, which utilises a radial basis function approximates the robot's dynamics. The other neural network, which employs a hyperbolic tangent activation function, is used to approximate the unknown backlash-like hysteresis. The authors also consider two cases: full state and output feedback control. For output feedback, where system states are unknown, a high gain observer is employed to estimate the states. The proposed controllers ensure the boundedness of the control signals. Simulations are also performed to show the effectiveness of the controllers

Intelligent flight control systems

The capabilities of flight control systems can be enhanced by designing them to emulate functions of natural intelligence. Intelligent control functions fall in three categories. Declarative actions involve decision-making, providing models for system monitoring, goal planning, and system/scenario identification. Procedural actions concern skilled behavior and have parallels in guidance, navigation, and adaptation. Reflexive actions are spontaneous, inner-loop responses for control and estimation. Intelligent flight control systems learn knowledge of the aircraft and its mission and adapt to changes in the flight environment. Cognitive models form an efficient basis for integrating 'outer-loop/inner-loop' control functions and for developing robust parallel-processing algorithms

Learning Sensor Feedback Models from Demonstrations via Phase-Modulated Neural Networks

In order to robustly execute a task under environmental uncertainty, a robot needs to be able to reactively adapt to changes arising in its environment. The environment changes are usually reflected in deviation from expected sensory traces. These deviations in sensory traces can be used to drive the motion adaptation, and for this purpose, a feedback model is required. The feedback model maps the deviations in sensory traces to the motion plan adaptation. In this paper, we develop a general data-driven framework for learning a feedback model from demonstrations. We utilize a variant of a radial basis function network structure --with movement phases as kernel centers-- which can generally be applied to represent any feedback models for movement primitives. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, we test it on the task of scraping on a tilt board. In this task, we are learning a reactive policy in the form of orientation adaptation, based on deviations of tactile sensor traces. As a proof of concept of our method, we provide evaluations on an anthropomorphic robot. A video demonstrating our approach and its results can be seen in https://youtu.be/7Dx5imy1KcwComment: 8 pages, accepted to be published at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 201

Dynamics Model Abstraction Scheme Using Radial Basis Functions

This paper presents a control model for object manipulation. Properties of objects and environmental conditions influence the motor control and learning. System dynamics depend on an unobserved external context, for example, work load of a robot manipulator. The dynamics of a robot arm change as it manipulates objects with different physical properties, for example, the mass, shape, or mass distribution. We address active sensing strategies to acquire object dynamical models with a radial basis function neural network (RBF). Experiments are done using a real robot's arm, and trajectory data are gathered during various trials manipulating different objects. Biped robots do not have high force joint servos and the control system hardly compensates all the inertia variation of the adjacent joints and disturbance torque on dynamic gait control. In order to achieve smoother control and lead to more reliable sensorimotor complexes, we evaluate and compare a sparse velocity-driven versus a dense position-driven control scheme

Teleoperation control based on combination of wave variable and neural networks

In this paper, a novel control scheme is developed for a teleoperation system, combining the radial basis function (RBF) neural networks (NNs) and wave variable technique to simultaneously compensate for the effects caused by communication delays and dynamics uncertainties. The teleoperation system is set up with a TouchX joystick as the master device and a simulated Baxter robot arm as the slave robot. The haptic feedback is provided to the human operator to sense the interaction force between the slave robot and the environment when manipulating the stylus of the joystick. To utilize the workspace of the telerobot as much as possible, a matching process is carried out between the master and the slave based on their kinematics models. The closed loop inverse kinematics method and RBF NN approximation technique are seamlessly integrated in the control design. To overcome the potential instability problem in the presence of delayed communication channels, wave variables and their corrections are effectively embedded into the control system, and Lyapunov-based analysis is performed to theoretically establish the closed-loop stability. Comparative experiments have been conducted for a trajectory tracking task, under the different conditions of various communication delays. Experimental results show that in terms of tracking performance and force reflection, the proposed control approach shows superior performance over the conventional methods

A brief review of neural networks based learning and control and their applications for robots

As an imitation of the biological nervous systems, neural networks (NN), which are characterized with powerful learning ability, have been employed in a wide range of applications, such as control of complex nonlinear systems, optimization, system identification and patterns recognition etc. This article aims to bring a brief review of the state-of-art NN for the complex nonlinear systems. Recent progresses of NNs in both theoretical developments and practical applications are investigated and surveyed. Specifically, NN based robot learning and control applications were further reviewed, including NN based robot manipulator control, NN based human robot interaction and NN based behavior recognition and generation