25,381 research outputs found
Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People
Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has renewed interest in
building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from
using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object
recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or
even beats humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and
performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in
crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly
human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current
engineering trends in both what they learn, and how they learn it.
Specifically, we argue that these machines should (a) build causal models of
the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely
solving pattern recognition problems; (b) ground learning in intuitive theories
of physics and psychology, to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned;
and (c) harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and
generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete
challenges and promising routes towards these goals that can combine the
strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive
models.Comment: In press at Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Open call for commentary
proposals (until Nov. 22, 2016).
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/information/calls-for-commentary/open-calls-for-commentar
A randomized kinodynamic planner for closed-chain robotic systems
Kinodynamic RRT planners are effective tools for finding feasible trajectories in many classes of robotic systems. However, they are hard to apply to systems with closed-kinematic chains, like parallel robots, cooperating arms manipulating an object, or legged robots keeping their feet in contact with the environ- ment. The state space of such systems is an implicitly-defined manifold, which complicates the design of the sampling and steering procedures, and leads to trajectories that drift away from the manifold when standard integration methods are used. To address these issues, this report presents a kinodynamic RRT planner that constructs an atlas of the state space incrementally, and uses this atlas to both generate ran- dom states, and to dynamically steer the system towards such states. The steering method is based on computing linear quadratic regulators from the atlas charts, which greatly increases the planner efficiency in comparison to the standard method that simulates random actions. The atlas also allows the integration of the equations of motion as a differential equation on the state space manifold, which eliminates any drift from such manifold and thus results in accurate trajectories. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first kinodynamic planner that explicitly takes closed kinematic chains into account. We illustrate the performance of the approach in significantly complex tasks, including planar and spatial robots that have to lift or throw a load at a given velocity using torque-limited actuators.Peer ReviewedPreprin
Generalized Regressive Motion: a Visual Cue to Collision
Brains and sensory systems evolved to guide motion. Central to this task is
controlling the approach to stationary obstacles and detecting moving
organisms. Looming has been proposed as the main monocular visual cue for
detecting the approach of other animals and avoiding collisions with stationary
obstacles. Elegant neural mechanisms for looming detection have been found in
the brain of insects and vertebrates. However, looming has not been analyzed in
the context of collisions between two moving animals. We propose an alternative
strategy, Generalized Regressive Motion (GRM), which is consistent with
recently observed behavior in fruit flies. Geometric analysis proves that GRM
is a reliable cue to collision among conspecifics, whereas agent-based modeling
suggests that GRM is a better cue than looming as a means to detect approach,
prevent collisions and maintain mobility
Parallelizing RRT on large-scale distributed-memory architectures
This paper addresses the problem of parallelizing the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm on large-scale distributed-memory architectures, using the Message Passing Interface. We compare three parallel versions of RRT based on classical parallelization schemes. We evaluate them on different motion planning problems and analyze the various factors influencing their performance
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