136 research outputs found
Humanoid Robots
For many years, the human being has been trying, in all ways, to recreate the complex mechanisms that form the human body. Such task is extremely complicated and the results are not totally satisfactory. However, with increasing technological advances based on theoretical and experimental researches, man gets, in a way, to copy or to imitate some systems of the human body. These researches not only intended to create humanoid robots, great part of them constituting autonomous systems, but also, in some way, to offer a higher knowledge of the systems that form the human body, objectifying possible applications in the technology of rehabilitation of human beings, gathering in a whole studies related not only to Robotics, but also to Biomechanics, Biomimmetics, Cybernetics, among other areas. This book presents a series of researches inspired by this ideal, carried through by various researchers worldwide, looking for to analyze and to discuss diverse subjects related to humanoid robots. The presented contributions explore aspects about robotic hands, learning, language, vision and locomotion
Recognizing complex faces and gaits via novel probabilistic models
In the field of computer vision, developing automated systems to recognize people
under unconstrained scenarios is a partially solved problem. In unconstrained sce-
narios a number of common variations and complexities such as occlusion, illumi-
nation, cluttered background and so on impose vast uncertainty to the recognition
process. Among the various biometrics that have been emerging recently, this
dissertation focus on two of them namely face and gait recognition.
Firstly we address the problem of recognizing faces with major occlusions amidst
other variations such as pose, scale, expression and illumination using a novel
PRObabilistic Component based Interpretation Model (PROCIM) inspired by key
psychophysical principles that are closely related to reasoning under uncertainty.
The model basically employs Bayesian Networks to establish, learn, interpret and
exploit intrinsic similarity mappings from the face domain. Then, by incorporating
e cient inference strategies, robust decisions are made for successfully recognizing
faces under uncertainty. PROCIM reports improved recognition rates over recent
approaches.
Secondly we address the newly upcoming gait recognition problem and show that
PROCIM can be easily adapted to the gait domain as well. We scienti cally
de ne and formulate sub-gaits and propose a novel modular training scheme to
e ciently learn subtle sub-gait characteristics from the gait domain. Our results
show that the proposed model is robust to several uncertainties and yields sig-
ni cant recognition performance. Apart from PROCIM, nally we show how a
simple component based gait reasoning can be coherently modeled using the re-
cently prominent Markov Logic Networks (MLNs) by intuitively fusing imaging,
logic and graphs.
We have discovered that face and gait domains exhibit interesting similarity map-
pings between object entities and their components. We have proposed intuitive
probabilistic methods to model these mappings to perform recognition under vari-
ous uncertainty elements. Extensive experimental validations justi es the robust-
ness of the proposed methods over the state-of-the-art techniques.
A Multi-Agent Approach for Adaptive Finger Cooperation in Learning-based In-Hand Manipulation
In-hand manipulation is challenging for a multi-finger robotic hand due to
its high degrees of freedom and the complex interaction with the object. To
enable in-hand manipulation, existing deep reinforcement learning based
approaches mainly focus on training a single robot-structure-specific policy
through the centralized learning mechanism, lacking adaptability to changes
like robot malfunction. To solve this limitation, this work treats each finger
as an individual agent and trains multiple agents to control their assigned
fingers to complete the in-hand manipulation task cooperatively. We propose the
Multi-Agent Global-Observation Critic and Local-Observation Actor (MAGCLA)
method, where the critic can observe all agents' actions globally, and the
actor only locally observes its neighbors' actions. Besides, conventional
individual experience replay may cause unstable cooperation due to the
asynchronous performance increment of each agent, which is critical for in-hand
manipulation tasks. To solve this issue, we propose the Synchronized Hindsight
Experience Replay (SHER) method to synchronize and efficiently reuse the
replayed experience across all agents. The methods are evaluated in two in-hand
manipulation tasks on the Shadow dexterous hand. The results show that SHER
helps MAGCLA achieve comparable learning efficiency to a single policy, and the
MAGCLA approach is more generalizable in different tasks. The trained policies
have higher adaptability in the robot malfunction test compared to the baseline
multi-agent and single-agent approaches.Comment: Submitted to ICRA 202
Proceedings of the NASA Conference on Space Telerobotics, volume 1
The theme of the Conference was man-machine collaboration in space. Topics addressed include: redundant manipulators; man-machine systems; telerobot architecture; remote sensing and planning; navigation; neural networks; fundamental AI research; and reasoning under uncertainty
A Survey on Physics Informed Reinforcement Learning: Review and Open Problems
The inclusion of physical information in machine learning frameworks has
revolutionized many application areas. This involves enhancing the learning
process by incorporating physical constraints and adhering to physical laws. In
this work we explore their utility for reinforcement learning applications. We
present a thorough review of the literature on incorporating physics
information, as known as physics priors, in reinforcement learning approaches,
commonly referred to as physics-informed reinforcement learning (PIRL). We
introduce a novel taxonomy with the reinforcement learning pipeline as the
backbone to classify existing works, compare and contrast them, and derive
crucial insights. Existing works are analyzed with regard to the
representation/ form of the governing physics modeled for integration, their
specific contribution to the typical reinforcement learning architecture, and
their connection to the underlying reinforcement learning pipeline stages. We
also identify core learning architectures and physics incorporation biases
(i.e., observational, inductive and learning) of existing PIRL approaches and
use them to further categorize the works for better understanding and
adaptation. By providing a comprehensive perspective on the implementation of
the physics-informed capability, the taxonomy presents a cohesive approach to
PIRL. It identifies the areas where this approach has been applied, as well as
the gaps and opportunities that exist. Additionally, the taxonomy sheds light
on unresolved issues and challenges, which can guide future research. This
nascent field holds great potential for enhancing reinforcement learning
algorithms by increasing their physical plausibility, precision, data
efficiency, and applicability in real-world scenarios
Exploring the effects of robotic design on learning and neural control
The ongoing deep learning revolution has allowed computers to outclass humans
in various games and perceive features imperceptible to humans during
classification tasks. Current machine learning techniques have clearly
distinguished themselves in specialized tasks. However, we have yet to see
robots capable of performing multiple tasks at an expert level. Most work in
this field is focused on the development of more sophisticated learning
algorithms for a robot's controller given a largely static and presupposed
robotic design. By focusing on the development of robotic bodies, rather than
neural controllers, I have discovered that robots can be designed such that
they overcome many of the current pitfalls encountered by neural controllers in
multitask settings. Through this discovery, I also present novel metrics to
explicitly measure the learning ability of a robotic design and its resistance
to common problems such as catastrophic interference.
Traditionally, the physical robot design requires human engineers to plan
every aspect of the system, which is expensive and often relies on human
intuition. In contrast, within the field of evolutionary robotics, evolutionary
algorithms are used to automatically create optimized designs, however, such
designs are often still limited in their ability to perform in a multitask
setting. The metrics created and presented here give a novel path to automated
design that allow evolved robots to synergize with their controller to improve
the computational efficiency of their learning while overcoming catastrophic
interference.
Overall, this dissertation intimates the ability to automatically design
robots that are more general purpose than current robots and that can perform
various tasks while requiring less computation.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2008.0639
Becoming Human with Humanoid
Nowadays, our expectations of robots have been significantly increases. The robot, which was initially only doing simple jobs, is now expected to be smarter and more dynamic. People want a robot that resembles a human (humanoid) has and has emotional intelligence that can perform action-reaction interactions. This book consists of two sections. The first section focuses on emotional intelligence, while the second section discusses the control of robotics. The contents of the book reveal the outcomes of research conducted by scholars in robotics fields to accommodate needs of society and industry
Human-robot interaction for assistive robotics
This dissertation presents an in-depth study of human-robot interaction (HRI) withapplication to assistive robotics. In various studies, dexterous in-hand manipulation is included, assistive robots for Sit-To-stand (STS) assistance along with the human intention estimation. In Chapter 1, the background and issues of HRI are explicitly discussed. In Chapter 2, the literature review introduces the recent state-of-the-art research on HRI, such as physical Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), robot STS assistance, dexterous in hand manipulation and human intention estimation. In Chapter 3, various models and control algorithms are described in detail. Chapter 4 introduces the research equipment. Chapter 5 presents innovative theories and implementations of HRI in assistive robotics, including a general methodology of robotic assistance from the human perspective, novel hardware design, robotic sit-to-stand (STS) assistance, human intention estimation, and control
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