5,289 research outputs found
Interoceptive robustness through environment-mediated morphological development
Typically, AI researchers and roboticists try to realize intelligent behavior
in machines by tuning parameters of a predefined structure (body plan and/or
neural network architecture) using evolutionary or learning algorithms. Another
but not unrelated longstanding property of these systems is their brittleness
to slight aberrations, as highlighted by the growing deep learning literature
on adversarial examples. Here we show robustness can be achieved by evolving
the geometry of soft robots, their control systems, and how their material
properties develop in response to one particular interoceptive stimulus
(engineering stress) during their lifetimes. By doing so we realized robots
that were equally fit but more robust to extreme material defects (such as
might occur during fabrication or by damage thereafter) than robots that did
not develop during their lifetimes, or developed in response to a different
interoceptive stimulus (pressure). This suggests that the interplay between
changes in the containing systems of agents (body plan and/or neural
architecture) at different temporal scales (evolutionary and developmental)
along different modalities (geometry, material properties, synaptic weights)
and in response to different signals (interoceptive and external perception)
all dictate those agents' abilities to evolve or learn capable and robust
strategies
Medical image computing and computer-aided medical interventions applied to soft tissues. Work in progress in urology
Until recently, Computer-Aided Medical Interventions (CAMI) and Medical
Robotics have focused on rigid and non deformable anatomical structures.
Nowadays, special attention is paid to soft tissues, raising complex issues due
to their mobility and deformation. Mini-invasive digestive surgery was probably
one of the first fields where soft tissues were handled through the development
of simulators, tracking of anatomical structures and specific assistance
robots. However, other clinical domains, for instance urology, are concerned.
Indeed, laparoscopic surgery, new tumour destruction techniques (e.g. HIFU,
radiofrequency, or cryoablation), increasingly early detection of cancer, and
use of interventional and diagnostic imaging modalities, recently opened new
challenges to the urologist and scientists involved in CAMI. This resulted in
the last five years in a very significant increase of research and developments
of computer-aided urology systems. In this paper, we propose a description of
the main problems related to computer-aided diagnostic and therapy of soft
tissues and give a survey of the different types of assistance offered to the
urologist: robotization, image fusion, surgical navigation. Both research
projects and operational industrial systems are discussed
Robust Whole-Body Motion Control of Legged Robots
We introduce a robust control architecture for the whole-body motion control
of torque controlled robots with arms and legs. The method is based on the
robust control of contact forces in order to track a planned Center of Mass
trajectory. Its appeal lies in the ability to guarantee robust stability and
performance despite rigid body model mismatch, actuator dynamics, delays,
contact surface stiffness, and unobserved ground profiles. Furthermore, we
introduce a task space decomposition approach which removes the coupling
effects between contact force controller and the other non-contact controllers.
Finally, we verify our control performance on a quadruped robot and compare its
performance to a standard inverse dynamics approach on hardware.Comment: 8 Page
Scalable Co-Optimization of Morphology and Control in Embodied Machines
Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together
over time. In contrast, in AI and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually
designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that fixed
design. The task of simultaneously co-optimizing the morphology and controller
of an embodied robot has remained a challenge. In psychology, the theory of
embodied cognition posits that behavior arises from a close coupling between
body plan and sensorimotor control, which suggests why co-optimizing these two
subsystems is so difficult: most evolutionary changes to morphology tend to
adversely impact sensorimotor control, leading to an overall decrease in
behavioral performance. Here, we further examine this hypothesis and
demonstrate a technique for "morphological innovation protection", which
temporarily reduces selection pressure on recently morphologically-changed
individuals, thus enabling evolution some time to "readapt" to the new
morphology with subsequent control policy mutations. We show the potential for
this method to avoid local optima and converge to similar highly fit
morphologies across widely varying initial conditions, while sustaining fitness
improvements further into optimization. While this technique is admittedly only
the first of many steps that must be taken to achieve scalable optimization of
embodied machines, we hope that theoretical insight into the cause of
evolutionary stagnation in current methods will help to enable the automation
of robot design and behavioral training -- while simultaneously providing a
testbed to investigate the theory of embodied cognition
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