Athletic robots demand a whole-body actuation system design that utilizes motors up to the boundaries of their performance. However, creating such robots poses challenges of integrating design principles and reasoning of practical design choices. This paper presents a design framework that guides designers to find optimal design choices to create an actuation system that can rapidly generate torques and velocities required to achieve a given set of tasks, by minimizing inertia and leveraging cooperation between actuators. The framework serves as an interactive tool for designers who are in charge of providing design rules and candidate components such as motors, reduction mechanism, and coupling mechanisms between actuators and joints. A binary integer linear optimization explores design combinations to find optimal components that can achieve a set of tasks. The framework is demonstrated with 200 optimal design studies of a biped with 5-degree-of-freedom (DoF) legs, focusing on the effect of achieving multiple tasks (walking, lifting), constraining the mass budget of all motors in the system and the use of coupling mechanisms. The result provides a comprehensive view of how design choices and rules affect reflected inertia, copper loss of motors, and force capability of optimal actuation systems.
Dexterous manipulation of objects once held in hand remains a challenge. Such skills are, however, necessary for robotics to move beyond gripper-based manipulation and use all the dexterity offered by anthropomorphic robotic hands. One major challenge when manipulating an object within the hand is that fingers must move around the object while avoiding collision with other fingers or the object. Such collision-free paths must be computed in real-time, as the smallest deviation from the original plan can easily lead to collisions. We present a real-time approach to computing collision-free paths in a high-dimensional space. To guide the exploration, we learn an explicit representation of the free space, retrievable in real-time. We further combine this representation with closed-loop control via dynamical systems and sampling-based motion planning and show that the combination increases performance compared to alternatives, offering efficient search of feasible paths and real-time obstacle avoidance in a multi-fingered robotic hand.
Generating human-like behavior on robots is a great challenge especially in dexterous manipulation tasks with robotic hands. Scripting policies from scratch is intractable due to the high-dimensional control space, and training policies with reinforcement learning (RL) and manual reward engineering can also be hard and lead to unnatural motions. Leveraging the recent progress on RL from Human Feedback, we propose a framework that learns a universal human prior using direct human preference feedback over videos, for efficiently tuning the RL policies on 20 dual-hand robot manipulation tasks in simulation, without a single human demonstration. A task-agnostic reward model is trained through iteratively generating diverse polices and collecting human preference over the trajectories; it is then applied for regularizing the behavior of polices in the fine-tuning stage. Our method empirically demonstrates more human-like behaviors on robot hands in diverse tasks including even unseen tasks, indicating its generalization capability.
Swarm aerial robots are required to maintain close proximity to successfully traverse narrow areas in cluttered environments. However, this movement is affected by the downwash effect generated from other quadrotors in the swarm. This aerodynamic effect is highly nonlinear and hard to describe through mathematical modeling. Additionally, the existence of the downwash disturbance can be predicted based on the states of neighboring quadrotors. If this prediction is considered, the control loop can proactively handle the disturbance, resulting in improved performance. To address these challenges, we propose an approach that integrates a Neural network Downwash Predictor with Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NDP-NMPC). The neural network is trained with spectral normalization to ensure robustness and safety in uncollected cases. The predicted disturbances are then incorporated into the optimization scheme in NMPC, which enforces constraints to ensure that states and inputs remain within safe limits. We also design a quadrotor system, identify its parameters, and implement the proposed method on board. Finally, we conduct a prediction experiment to validate the safety and effectiveness of the network. In addition, a real-time trajectory tracking experiment is performed with the entire system, demonstrating a 75.37% reduction in tracking error in height under the downwash effect.
Robust design is one of the main tools employed by engineers for the facilitation of the design of high-quality processes. However, most real-world processes invariably contend with external uncontrollable factors, often denoted as outliers or contaminated data, which exert a substantial distorting effect upon the computed sample mean. In pursuit of mitigating the inherent bias entailed by outliers within the dataset, the concept of weight adjustment emerges as a prudent recourse, to make the sample more representative of the statistical population. In this sense, the intricate challenge lies in the judicious application of these diverse weights toward the estimation of an alternative to the robust location estimator. Different from the previous studies, this study proposes two categories of new weighted Hodges-Lehmann (WHL) estimators that incorporate weight factors in the location parameter estimation. To evaluate their robust performances in estimating the location parameter, this study constructs a set of comprehensive simulations to compare various location estimators including mean, weighted mean, weighted median, Hodges-Lehmann estimator, and the proposed WHL estimators. The findings unequivocally manifest that the proposed WHL estimators clearly outperform the traditional methods in terms of their breakdown points, biases, and relative efficiencies.
Sparse Bayesian Learning (SBL) constructs an extremely sparse probabilistic model with very competitive generalization. However, SBL needs to invert a big covariance matrix with complexity $O(M^3)$ (M: feature size) for updating the regularization priors, making it difficult for problems with high dimensional feature space or large data size. As it may easily suffer from the memory overflow issue in such problems. This paper addresses this issue with a newly proposed diagonal Quasi-Newton (DQN) method for SBL called DQN-SBL where the inversion of big covariance matrix is ignored so that the complexity is reduced to $O(M)$. The DQN-SBL is thoroughly evaluated for non linear and linear classifications with various benchmarks of different sizes. Experimental results verify that DQN-SBL receives competitive generalization with a very sparse model and scales well to large-scale problems.
The robotic manipulation of deformable linear objects has shown great potential in a wide range of real-world applications. However, it presents many challenges due to the objects' complex nonlinearity and high-dimensional configuration. In this paper, we propose a new shape servoing framework to automatically manipulate elastic rods through visual feedback. Our new method uses parameterized regression features to compute a compact (low-dimensional) feature vector that quantifies the object's shape, thus, enabling to establish an explicit shape servo-loop. To automatically deform the rod into a desired shape, the proposed adaptive controller iteratively estimates the differential transformation between the robot's motion and the relative shape changes; This valuable capability allows to effectively manipulate objects with unknown mechanical models. An auto-tuning algorithm is introduced to adjust the robot's shaping motions in real-time based on optimal performance criteria. To validate the proposed framework, a detailed experimental study with vision-guided robotic manipulators is presented.
This paper presents a novel design for a compact, lightweight 6-axis force/torque sensor intended for use in legged robots. The design promotes easy manufacturing and cost reduction, while introducing innovative calibration methods that simplify the calibration process and minimize effort. The sensor's advantages are achieved by streamlining the structure for durability, implementing noncontact sensors, and providing a wider sensing range compared to commercial sensors. To maintain a simple structure, the paper proposes a force sensing scheme using photocouplers where the sensing elements are aligned in-plane. This strategy enables all sensing elements to be fabricated on a single printed circuit board, eliminating manual labor tasks such as bonding and coating the sensing elements. The prototype sensor contains only four parts, costs less than $250, and exhibits high response frequency and performance. Traditional calibration methods present challenges, such as the need for specialized equipment and extensive labor. To facilitate easy calibration without the need for specialized equipment, a new method using optimal control is proposed. To verify the feasibility of these ideas, a prototype six-axis F/T sensor was manufactured. Its performance was evaluated and compared to a reference F/T sensor and previous calibration methods.
Recent artificial intelligence (AI) systems have reached milestones in "grand challenges" ranging from Go to protein-folding. The capability to retrieve medical knowledge, reason over it, and answer medical questions comparably to physicians has long been viewed as one such grand challenge. Large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed significant progress in medical question answering; Med-PaLM was the first model to exceed a "passing" score in US Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) style questions with a score of 67.2% on the MedQA dataset. However, this and other prior work suggested significant room for improvement, especially when models' answers were compared to clinicians' answers. Here we present Med-PaLM 2, which bridges these gaps by leveraging a combination of base LLM improvements (PaLM 2), medical domain finetuning, and prompting strategies including a novel ensemble refinement approach. Med-PaLM 2 scored up to 86.5% on the MedQA dataset, improving upon Med-PaLM by over 19% and setting a new state-of-the-art. We also observed performance approaching or exceeding state-of-the-art across MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and MMLU clinical topics datasets. We performed detailed human evaluations on long-form questions along multiple axes relevant to clinical applications. In pairwise comparative ranking of 1066 consumer medical questions, physicians preferred Med-PaLM 2 answers to those produced by physicians on eight of nine axes pertaining to clinical utility (p < 0.001). We also observed significant improvements compared to Med-PaLM on every evaluation axis (p < 0.001) on newly introduced datasets of 240 long-form "adversarial" questions to probe LLM limitations. While further studies are necessary to validate the efficacy of these models in real-world settings, these results highlight rapid progress towards physician-level performance in medical question answering.
The advent of artificial intelligence technology paved the way of many researches to be made within air combat sector. Academicians and many other researchers did a research on a prominent research direction called autonomous maneuver decision of UAV. Elaborative researches produced some outcomes, but decisions that include Reinforcement Learning(RL) came out to be more efficient. There have been many researches and experiments done to make an agent reach its target in an optimal way, most prominent are Genetic Algorithm(GA) , A star, RRT and other various optimization techniques have been used. But Reinforcement Learning is the well known one for its success. In DARPHA Alpha Dogfight Trials, reinforcement learning prevailed against a real veteran F16 human pilot who was trained by Boeing. This successor model was developed by Heron Systems. After this accomplishment, reinforcement learning bring tremendous attention on itself. In this research we aimed our UAV which has a dubin vehicle dynamic property to move to the target in two dimensional space in an optimal path using Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (TD3) and used in experience replay Hindsight Experience Replay(HER).We did tests on two different environments and used simulations.
Human-in-the-loop aims to train an accurate prediction model with minimum cost by integrating human knowledge and experience. Humans can provide training data for machine learning applications and directly accomplish some tasks that are hard for computers in the pipeline with the help of machine-based approaches. In this paper, we survey existing works on human-in-the-loop from a data perspective and classify them into three categories with a progressive relationship: (1) the work of improving model performance from data processing, (2) the work of improving model performance through interventional model training, and (3) the design of the system independent human-in-the-loop. Using the above categorization, we summarize major approaches in the field, along with their technical strengths/ weaknesses, we have simple classification and discussion in natural language processing, computer vision, and others. Besides, we provide some open challenges and opportunities. This survey intends to provide a high-level summarization for human-in-the-loop and motivates interested readers to consider approaches for designing effective human-in-the-loop solutions.