Human-Robot Gym: Benchmarking Reinforcement Learning in Human-Robot Collaboration

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising results in robot motion planning with first attempts in human-robot collaboration (HRC). However, a fair comparison of RL approaches in HRC under the constraint of guaranteed safety is yet to be made. We, therefore, present human-robot gym, a benchmark for safe RL in HRC. Our benchmark provides eight challenging, realistic HRC tasks in a modular simulation framework. Most importantly, human-robot gym includes a safety shield that provably guarantees human safety. We are, thereby, the first to provide a benchmark to train RL agents that adhere to the safety specifications of real-world HRC. This bridges a critical gap between theoretic RL research and its real-world deployment. Our evaluation of six environments led to three key results: (a) the diverse nature of the tasks offered by human-robot gym creates a challenging benchmark for state-of-the-art RL methods, (b) incorporating expert knowledge in the RL training in the form of an action-based reward can outperform the expert, and (c) our agents negligibly overfit to training data

Pain inhibition is not affected by exercise-induced pain

Introduction: Offset analgesia (OA) and conditioned pain modulation (CPM) are frequently used paradigms to assess the descending pain modulation system. Recently, it was shown that both paradigms are reduced in chronic pain, but the influence of acute pain has not yet been adequately examined. Objectives: The aim of this study is to investigate OA and CPM after exercise-induced pain to evaluate whether these tests can be influenced by delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS) at a local or remote body site. Methods: Forty-two healthy adults were invited to 3 separate examination days: a baseline appointment, the consecutive day, and 7 days later. Participants were randomly divided into a rest (n 5 21) and an exercise group (n 5 21). The latter performed a single intensive exercise for the lower back. Before, immediately after, and on the following examination days, OA and CPM were measured at the forearm and the lower back by blinded assessor. Results: The exercise provoked a moderate pain perception and a mild delayed-onset muscle soreness on the following day. Repeatedmeasurements analysis of variance showed no statistically significantmaineffect for eitherOAorCPMat the forearmor lower back (P.0.05). Conclusion: Delayed-onset muscle soreness was shown to have no effect on the inhibitory pain modulation system neither locally (at the painful body part), nor remotely. Thus, OA and CPM are robust test paradigms that probably require more intense, different, or prolonged pain to be modulated

Gold-Catalyzed Diastereoselective Cycloisomerization of Alkylidene-Cyclopropane-Bearing 1,6-Diynes

An unprecedented gold-catalyzed diastereoselective cycloisomerization of 1,6-diynes bearing an alkylidene cyclopropane moiety has been developed. This methodology enables rapid access to a variety of 1,2-trimethylenenorbornanes, important building blocks in the preparations of abiotic and sesquiterpene core structures

Copper-catalyzed borylative allyl-allyl coupling reaction.

Borylative allyl-allyl coupling using allenes, bis(pinacolato)diboron, and allyl phosphates has been developed in the presence of a copper catalyst bearing an N-heterocyclic carbene ligand. The reaction affords boryl-substituted 1, 5-diene derivatives in good to high yields with high regioselectivity and Z selectivity