105 research outputs found
GPU Based Path Integral Control with Learned Dynamics
We present an algorithm which combines recent advances in model based path
integral control with machine learning approaches to learning forward dynamics
models. We take advantage of the parallel computing power of a GPU to quickly
take a massive number of samples from a learned probabilistic dynamics model,
which we use to approximate the path integral form of the optimal control. The
resulting algorithm runs in a receding-horizon fashion in realtime, and is
subject to no restrictive assumptions about costs, constraints, or dynamics. A
simple change to the path integral control formulation allows the algorithm to
take model uncertainty into account during planning, and we demonstrate its
performance on a quadrotor navigation task. In addition to this novel
adaptation of path integral control, this is the first time that a
receding-horizon implementation of iterative path integral control has been run
on a real system.Comment: 6 pages, NIPS 2014 - Autonomously Learning Robots Worksho
Experimental Validation of Contact Dynamics for In-Hand Manipulation
This paper evaluates state-of-the-art contact models at predicting the
motions and forces involved in simple in-hand robotic manipulations. In
particular it focuses on three primitive actions --linear sliding, pivoting,
and rolling-- that involve contacts between a gripper, a rigid object, and
their environment. The evaluation is done through thousands of controlled
experiments designed to capture the motion of object and gripper, and all
contact forces and torques at 250Hz. We demonstrate that a contact modeling
approach based on Coulomb's friction law and maximum energy principle is
effective at reasoning about interaction to first order, but limited for making
accurate predictions. We attribute the major limitations to 1) the
non-uniqueness of force resolution inherent to grasps with multiple hard
contacts of complex geometries, 2) unmodeled dynamics due to contact
compliance, and 3) unmodeled geometries dueto manufacturing defects.Comment: International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, ISER 2016, Tokyo,
Japa
Minimax Iterative Dynamic Game: Application to Nonlinear Robot Control Tasks
Multistage decision policies provide useful control strategies in
high-dimensional state spaces, particularly in complex control tasks. However,
they exhibit weak performance guarantees in the presence of disturbance, model
mismatch, or model uncertainties. This brittleness limits their use in
high-risk scenarios. We present how to quantify the sensitivity of such
policies in order to inform of their robustness capacity. We also propose a
minimax iterative dynamic game framework for designing robust policies in the
presence of disturbance/uncertainties. We test the quantification hypothesis on
a carefully designed deep neural network policy; we then pose a minimax
iterative dynamic game (iDG) framework for improving policy robustness in the
presence of adversarial disturbances. We evaluate our iDG framework on a
mecanum-wheeled robot, whose goal is to find a ocally robust optimal multistage
policy that achieve a given goal-reaching task. The algorithm is simple and
adaptable for designing meta-learning/deep policies that are robust against
disturbances, model mismatch, or model uncertainties, up to a disturbance
bound. Videos of the results are on the author's website,
http://ecs.utdallas.edu/~opo140030/iros18/iros2018.html, while the codes for
reproducing our experiments are on github,
https://github.com/lakehanne/youbot/tree/rilqg. A self-contained environment
for reproducing our results is on docker,
https://hub.docker.com/r/lakehanne/youbotbuntu14/Comment: 2018 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and System
Non-Linear Model Predictive Control with Adaptive Time-Mesh Refinement
In this paper, we present a novel solution for real-time, Non-Linear Model
Predictive Control (NMPC) exploiting a time-mesh refinement strategy. The
proposed controller formulates the Optimal Control Problem (OCP) in terms of
flat outputs over an adaptive lattice. In common approximated OCP solutions,
the number of discretization points composing the lattice represents a critical
upper bound for real-time applications. The proposed NMPC-based technique
refines the initially uniform time horizon by adding time steps with a sampling
criterion that aims to reduce the discretization error. This enables a higher
accuracy in the initial part of the receding horizon, which is more relevant to
NMPC, while keeping bounded the number of discretization points. By combining
this feature with an efficient Least Square formulation, our solver is also
extremely time-efficient, generating trajectories of multiple seconds within
only a few milliseconds. The performance of the proposed approach has been
validated in a high fidelity simulation environment, by using an UAV platform.
We also released our implementation as open source C++ code.Comment: In: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and
Programming for Autonomous Robots (SIMPAR 2018
Differential Dynamic Programming for time-delayed systems
Trajectory optimization considers the problem of deciding how to control a
dynamical system to move along a trajectory which minimizes some cost function.
Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) is an optimal control method which
utilizes a second-order approximation of the problem to find the control. It is
fast enough to allow real-time control and has been shown to work well for
trajectory optimization in robotic systems. Here we extend classic DDP to
systems with multiple time-delays in the state. Being able to find optimal
trajectories for time-delayed systems with DDP opens up the possibility to use
richer models for system identification and control, including recurrent neural
networks with multiple timesteps in the state. We demonstrate the algorithm on
a two-tank continuous stirred tank reactor. We also demonstrate the algorithm
on a recurrent neural network trained to model an inverted pendulum with
position information only.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, conference, Decision and Control (CDC), 2016 IEEE
55th Conference o
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