Reinforcement Learning for Generative Art

Reinforcement learning (RL) is an efficient class of sequential decision-making algorithms that have achieved remarkable success in a broad range of applications, such as robotic manipulations, strategic games, or autonomous driving. The most well-known example of reinforcement learning is AlphaGo, a computer program that plays the board game Go and outperforms top human Go players. Unlike other two major machine learning categories, supervised learning and unsupervised learning, in which media artists are actively engaged, reinforcement learning has yet to result in many creative applications. Generative art is usually driven, in whole or in part, by autonomous systems that are derived from a set of rules. Interestingly, an RL policy can be seen as an autonomous system where the rules are learned by interacting with its environment. Regardless of its initial purpose, reinforcement learning has the potential to expand the boundary of generative art. However, a formal process of applying reinforcement learning to generative art does not yet exist and the current RL tools require an in-depth understanding of RL concepts. To bridge the gap, the first part of the dissertation introduces a conceptual framework to adapt reinforcement learning for generative art. The framework proposes a term RL-based generative art to denote a novel form of generative art of which the use of RL agents is the key element. The creative process of RL-based generative art and possible emergent behaviors are discussed in the framework. This leads to a discussion of several author's related practices on generative art, deep-learning art, and reinforcement learning. Those practices are critical for understanding the conceptual and technical details of each component in order to construct the framework. The second part introduces RL5, a JavaScript library for rapidly prototyping RL environments and training RL policies in web browsers. The library combines RL algorithms and RL environments into one framework and is fully compatible with p5.js. RL5 is developed with a particular focus on simplicity to favor (re)usability of RL algorithms and development of RL environments. Specifically, the library implemented three RL algorithms, Tabular Q-learning, REINFORCE, and DDPG, to cover all the three families of model-free RL, and nine RL environments that six of them address autonomous agents in steering behaviors, which can be used as building blocks for complex systems. Finally, the author demonstrates four different use cases of how to apply RL5 for pedagogical and creative applications

A double-edged sword: Use of computer algebra systems in first-year Engineering Mathematics and Mechanics courses

Many secondary-level mathematics students have experience with graphical calculators from high school. For the purposes of this paper we define graphical calculators as those able to perform rudimentary symbolic manipulation and solve complicated equations requiring very modest user knowledge. The use of more advanced computer algebra systems e.g. Maple, Mathematica, Mathcad, Matlab/MuPad is becoming more prevalent in tertiary-level courses. This paper explores our students’ experience using one such system (MuPad) in first-year tertiary Engineering Mathematics and Mechanics courses. The effectiveness of graphical calculators and computer algebra systems in mathematical pedagogy has been investigated by a multitude of educational researchers (e.g. Ravaglia et al. 1998). Most of these studies found very small or no correlation between student use of graphical calculators or exposure to computer algebra systems with future achievement in mathematics courses (Buteau et al. 2010). In this paper we focus instead on students’ attitude towards a more advanced standalone computer algebra system (MuPad), and whether students’ inclination to use the system is indicative of their mathematical understanding. Paper describing some preliminary research into use of computer algebra systems for teaching engineering mathematics

GPU Computing for Cognitive Robotics

This thesis presents the first investigation of the impact of GPU computing on cognitive robotics by providing a series of novel experiments in the area of action and language acquisition in humanoid robots and computer vision. Cognitive robotics is concerned with endowing robots with high-level cognitive capabilities to enable the achievement of complex goals in complex environments. Reaching the ultimate goal of developing cognitive robots will require tremendous amounts of computational power, which was until recently provided mostly by standard CPU processors. CPU cores are optimised for serial code execution at the expense of parallel execution, which renders them relatively inefficient when it comes to high-performance computing applications. The ever-increasing market demand for high-performance, real-time 3D graphics has evolved the GPU into a highly parallel, multithreaded, many-core processor extraordinary computational power and very high memory bandwidth. These vast computational resources of modern GPUs can now be used by the most of the cognitive robotics models as they tend to be inherently parallel. Various interesting and insightful cognitive models were developed and addressed important scientific questions concerning action-language acquisition and computer vision. While they have provided us with important scientific insights, their complexity and application has not improved much over the last years. The experimental tasks as well as the scale of these models are often minimised to avoid excessive training times that grow exponentially with the number of neurons and the training data. This impedes further progress and development of complex neurocontrollers that would be able to take the cognitive robotics research a step closer to reaching the ultimate goal of creating intelligent machines. This thesis presents several cases where the application of the GPU computing on cognitive robotics algorithms resulted in the development of large-scale neurocontrollers of previously unseen complexity enabling the conducting of the novel experiments described herein.European Commission Seventh Framework Programm

Surgical Subtask Automation for Intraluminal Procedures using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Intraluminal procedures have opened up a new sub-field of minimally invasive surgery that use flexible instruments to navigate through complex luminal structures of the body, resulting in reduced invasiveness and improved patient benefits. One of the major challenges in this field is the accurate and precise control of the instrument inside the human body. Robotics has emerged as a promising solution to this problem. However, to achieve successful robotic intraluminal interventions, the control of the instrument needs to be automated to a large extent. The thesis first examines the state-of-the-art in intraluminal surgical robotics and identifies the key challenges in this field, which include the need for safe and effective tool manipulation, and the ability to adapt to unexpected changes in the luminal environment. To address these challenges, the thesis proposes several levels of autonomy that enable the robotic system to perform individual subtasks autonomously, while still allowing the surgeon to retain overall control of the procedure. The approach facilitates the development of specialized algorithms such as Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for subtasks like navigation and tissue manipulation to produce robust surgical gestures. Additionally, the thesis proposes a safety framework that provides formal guarantees to prevent risky actions. The presented approaches are evaluated through a series of experiments using simulation and robotic platforms. The experiments demonstrate that subtask automation can improve the accuracy and efficiency of tool positioning and tissue manipulation, while also reducing the cognitive load on the surgeon. The results of this research have the potential to improve the reliability and safety of intraluminal surgical interventions, ultimately leading to better outcomes for patients and surgeons

Context-aware learning for robot-assisted endovascular catheterization

Endovascular intervention has become a mainstream treatment of cardiovascular diseases. However, multiple challenges remain such as unwanted radiation exposures, limited two-dimensional image guidance, insufficient force perception and haptic cues. Fast evolving robot-assisted platforms improve the stability and accuracy of instrument manipulation. The master-slave system also removes radiation to the operator. However, the integration of robotic systems into the current surgical workflow is still debatable since repetitive, easy tasks have little value to be executed by the robotic teleoperation. Current systems offer very low autonomy, potential autonomous features could bring more benefits such as reduced cognitive workloads and human error, safer and more consistent instrument manipulation, ability to incorporate various medical imaging and sensing modalities. This research proposes frameworks for automated catheterisation with different machine learning-based algorithms, includes Learning-from-Demonstration, Reinforcement Learning, and Imitation Learning. Those frameworks focused on integrating context for tasks in the process of skill learning, hence achieving better adaptation to different situations and safer tool-tissue interactions. Furthermore, the autonomous feature was applied to next-generation, MR-safe robotic catheterisation platform. The results provide important insights into improving catheter navigation in the form of autonomous task planning, self-optimization with clinical relevant factors, and motivate the design of intelligent, intuitive, and collaborative robots under non-ionizing image modalities.Open Acces

A Posture Sequence Learning System for an Anthropomorphic Robotic Hand

The paper presents a cognitive architecture for posture learning of an anthropomorphic robotic hand. Our approach is aimed to allow the robotic system to perform complex perceptual operations, to interact with a human user and to integrate the perceptions by a cognitive representation of the scene and the observed actions. The anthropomorphic robotic hand imitates the gestures acquired by the vision system in order to learn meaningful movements, to build its knowledge by different conceptual spaces and to perform complex interaction with the human operator

Integrating BDI and Reinforcement Learning: the Case Study of Autonomous Driving

Recent breakthroughs in machine learning are paving the way to the vision of software 2.0 era, which foresees the replacement of traditional software development with such techniques for many applications. In the context of agent-oriented programming, we believe that mixing together cognitive architectures like the BDI one and learning techniques could trigger new interesting scenarios. In that view, our previous work presents Jason-RL, a framework that integrates BDI agents and Reinforcement Learning (RL) more deeply than what has been already proposed so far in the literature. The framework allows the development of BDI agents having both explicitly programmed plans and plans learned by the agent using RL. The two kinds of plans are seamlessly integrated and can be used without differences. Here, we take autonomous driving as a case study to verify the advantages of the proposed approach and framework. The BDI agent has hard-coded plans that define high-level directions while fine-grained navigation is learned by trial and error. This approach – compared to plain RL – is encouraging as RL struggles in temporally extended planning. We defined and trained an agent able to drive in a track with an intersection, at which it has to choose the correct path to reach the assigned target. A first step towards porting the system in the real-world has been done by building a 1/10 scale racecar prototype which learned how to drive in a simple track