1,015 research outputs found
Beyond Basins of Attraction: Quantifying Robustness of Natural Dynamics
Properly designing a system to exhibit favorable natural dynamics can greatly
simplify designing or learning the control policy. However, it is still unclear
what constitutes favorable natural dynamics and how to quantify its effect.
Most studies of simple walking and running models have focused on the basins of
attraction of passive limit-cycles and the notion of self-stability. We instead
emphasize the importance of stepping beyond basins of attraction. We show an
approach based on viability theory to quantify robust sets in state-action
space. These sets are valid for the family of all robust control policies,
which allows us to quantify the robustness inherent to the natural dynamics
before designing the control policy or specifying a control objective. We
illustrate our formulation using spring-mass models, simple low dimensional
models of running systems. We then show an example application by optimizing
robustness of a simulated planar monoped, using a gradient-free optimization
scheme. Both case studies result in a nonlinear effective stiffness providing
more robustness.Comment: 15 pages. This work has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on
Robotics (2019
Fault diagnosis for vehicle lateral dynamics with robust threshold
This paper investigates the robust fault diagnosis problem for vehicle lateral dynamics, which play a key role in vehicle stability and driving safety. The proposed fault diagnosis system consists of two sub-systems: fault diagnosis observer
and robust threshold. By treating faults as disturbances, Disturbance/Uncertainty Estimation technique is used as fault diagnosis observer to generate residuals. Considering that residuals of model-based fault diagnosis are subject to the effect of uncertainties and consequently large false alarm rate may be resulted in, a novel robust threshold is then proposed based on reachability analysis technique for uncertain systems. The proposed fault
diagnosis system is finally applied to the accelerometer and gyrometer sensor fault diagnosis problem of vehicle lateral
dynamics, where initial states and velocity are considered to be uncertain. Simulation study verifies the effectiveness of the
proposed fault diagnosis system
Learning from Outside the Viability Kernel: Why we Should Build Robots that can Fall with Grace
Despite impressive results using reinforcement learning to solve complex
problems from scratch, in robotics this has still been largely limited to
model-based learning with very informative reward functions. One of the major
challenges is that the reward landscape often has large patches with no
gradient, making it difficult to sample gradients effectively. We show here
that the robot state-initialization can have a more important effect on the
reward landscape than is generally expected. In particular, we show the
counter-intuitive benefit of including initializations that are unviable, in
other words initializing in states that are doomed to fail.Comment: Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE International Conference on SImulation,
Modeling and Programming for Autonomous Robots (SIMPAR), Brisbane, Australia,
16-19 201
Data-Driven Grasp Synthesis - A Survey
We review the work on data-driven grasp synthesis and the methodologies for
sampling and ranking candidate grasps. We divide the approaches into three
groups based on whether they synthesize grasps for known, familiar or unknown
objects. This structure allows us to identify common object representations and
perceptual processes that facilitate the employed data-driven grasp synthesis
technique. In the case of known objects, we concentrate on the approaches that
are based on object recognition and pose estimation. In the case of familiar
objects, the techniques use some form of a similarity matching to a set of
previously encountered objects. Finally for the approaches dealing with unknown
objects, the core part is the extraction of specific features that are
indicative of good grasps. Our survey provides an overview of the different
methodologies and discusses open problems in the area of robot grasping. We
also draw a parallel to the classical approaches that rely on analytic
formulations.Comment: 20 pages, 30 Figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Robotic
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