Design and Control of Compliant Tensegrity Robots Through Simulation and Hardware Validation

To better understand the role of tensegrity structures in biological systems and their application to robotics, the Dynamic Tensegrity Robotics Lab at NASA Ames Research Center has developed and validated two different software environments for the analysis, simulation, and design of tensegrity robots. These tools, along with new control methodologies and the modular hardware components developed to validate them, are presented as a system for the design of actuated tensegrity structures. As evidenced from their appearance in many biological systems, tensegrity ("tensile-integrity") structures have unique physical properties which make them ideal for interaction with uncertain environments. Yet these characteristics, such as variable structural compliance, and global multi-path load distribution through the tension network, make design and control of bio-inspired tensegrity robots extremely challenging. This work presents the progress in using these two tools in tackling the design and control challenges. The results of this analysis includes multiple novel control approaches for mobility and terrain interaction of spherical tensegrity structures. The current hardware prototype of a six-bar tensegrity, code-named ReCTeR, is presented in the context of this validation

Av avcı probleminde durum soyutlama yoluyla işbirliği öğrenme.

Hunter-Prey or Prey-Pursuit problem is a common toy domain for Reinforcement Learning, but the size of the state space is exponential in the parameters such as size of the grid or number of agents. As the size of the state space makes the flat Q-learning impossible to use for different scenarios, this thesis presents an approach to make the size of the state space constant by producing agents that use previously learned knowledge to perform on bigger scenarios containing more agents. Inspired from HRL methods, the method is composed of a parallel subtasks schema dividing the task into choices of simpler subtasks, a state representation technique convenient for this schema and its extension for bigger grids. Experimental results show that proposed method successfully provides agents that perform near to hand-coded agents by using constant sized state space independent from parameters of the domain.M.S. - Master of Scienc