Mingjie Lin

Apan Dastider, Hao Fang, Mingjie Lin

Real-time interception of fast-moving objects by robotic arms in dynamic environments poses a formidable challenge due to the need for rapid reaction times, often within milliseconds, amidst dynamic obstacles. This paper introduces a unified control framework to address the above challenge by simultaneously intercepting dynamic objects and avoiding moving obstacles. Central to our approach is using diffusion-based variational autoencoder for motion planning to perform both object interception and obstacle avoidance. We begin by encoding the high-dimensional temporal information from streaming events into a two-dimensional latent manifold, enabling the discrimination between safe and colliding trajectories, culminating in the construction of an offline densely connected trajectory graph. Subsequently, we employ an extended Kalman filter to achieve precise real-time tracking of the moving object. Leveraging a graph-traversing strategy on the established offline dense graph, we generate encoded robotic motor control commands. Finally, we decode these commands to enable real-time motion of robotic motors, ensuring effective obstacle avoidance and high interception accuracy of fast-moving objects. Experimental validation on both computer simulations and autonomous 7-DoF robotic arms demonstrates the efficacy of our proposed framework. Results indicate the capability of the robotic manipulator to navigate around multiple obstacles of varying sizes and shapes while successfully intercepting fast-moving objects thrown from different angles by hand. Complete video demonstrations of our experiments can be found in https://sites.google.com/view/multirobotskill/home.

Apan Dastider, Mingjie Lin

In modern robotics, effectively computing optimal control policies under dynamically varying environments poses substantial challenges to the off-the-shelf parametric policy gradient methods, such as the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) and Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic policy gradient (TD3). In this paper, we propose a systematic methodology to dynamically learn a sequence of optimal control policies non-parametrically, while autonomously adapting with the constantly changing environment dynamics. Specifically, our non-parametric kernel-based methodology embeds a policy distribution as the features in a non-decreasing Euclidean space, therefore allowing its search space to be defined as a very high (possible infinite) dimensional RKHS (Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space). Moreover, by leveraging the similarity metric computed in RKHS, we augmented our non-parametric learning with the technique of AdaptiveH- adaptively selecting a time-frame window of finishing the optimal part of whole action-sequence sampled on some preceding observed state. To validate our proposed approach, we conducted extensive experiments with multiple classic benchmarks and one simulated robotics benchmark equipped with dynamically changing environments. Overall, our methodology has outperformed the well-established DDPG and TD3 methodology by a sizeable margin in terms of learning performance.

Apan Dastider, Mingjie Lin

Safe and efficient collaboration among multiple robots in unstructured environments is increasingly critical in the era of Industry 4.0. However, achieving robust and autonomous collaboration among humans and other robots requires modern robotic systems to have effective proximity perception and reactive obstacle avoidance. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for reactive whole-body obstacle avoidance that ensures conflict-free robot-robot interactions even in dynamic environment. Unlike existing approaches based on Jacobian-type, sampling based or geometric techniques, our methodology leverages the latest deep learning advances and topological manifold learning, enabling it to be readily generalized to other problem settings with high computing efficiency and fast graph traversal techniques. Our approach allows a robotic arm to proactively avoid obstacles of arbitrary 3D shapes without direct contact, a significant improvement over traditional industrial cobot settings. To validate our approach, we implement it on a robotic platform consisting of dual 6-DoF robotic arms with optimized proximity sensor placement, capable of working collaboratively with varying levels of interference. Specifically, one arm performs reactive whole-body obstacle avoidance while achieving its pre-determined objective, while the other arm emulates the presence of a human collaborator with independent and potentially adversarial movements. Our methodology provides a robust and effective solution for safe human-robot collaboration in non-stationary environments.

Azzam Alhussain, Mingjie Lin

Accelerating Human Action Recognition (HAR) efficiently for real-time surveillance and robotic systems on edge chips remains a challenging research field, given its high computational and memory requirements. This paper proposed an integrated end-to-end HAR scalable HW/SW accelerator co-design based on an enhanced 8-bit quantized Two-Stream SimpleNet-PyTorch CNN architecture. Our network accelerator was trained on UCF101 and UCF24 datasets and implemented on edge SoC-FPGA. Our development uses partially streaming dataflow architecture to achieve higher throughput versus network design and resource utilization trade-off. We also fused all convolutional, batch-norm, and ReLU operations into a single homogeneous layer and utilized the Lucas-Kanade motion flow method to enable a high parallelism accelerator design and optimized on-chip engine computing.Furthermore, our proposed methodology achieved nearly 81% prediction accuracy with an approximately 24 FPS real-time inference throughput at 187MHz on ZCU104, which is 1.7x - 1.9x higher than the prior research. Lastly, the designed framework was benchmarked against several hardware chips for higher throughput and performance measurements and is now available as an open-source project on GitHub for training and implementation on edge platforms.

Azzam Alhussain, Mingjie Lin

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are cutting-edge algorithms for generating new data samples based on the learned data distribution. However, its performance comes at a significant cost in terms of computation and memory requirements. In this paper, we proposed an HW/SW co-design approach for training quantized deconvolution GAN (QDCGAN) implemented on FPGA using a scalable streaming dataflow architecture capable of achieving higher throughput versus resource utilization trade-off. The developed accelerator is based on an efficient deconvolution engine that offers high parallelism with respect to scaling factors for GAN-based edge computing. Furthermore, various precisions, datasets, and network scalability were analyzed for low-power inference on resource-constrained platforms. Lastly, an end-to-end open-source framework is provided for training, implementation, state-space exploration, and scaling the inference using Vivado high-level synthesis for Xilinx SoC-FPGAs, and a comparison testbed with Jetson Nano.

Sayyed Jaffar Ali Raza, Apan Dastider, Mingjie Lin

Many robot manipulation skills can be represented with deterministic characteristics and there exist efficient techniques for learning parameterized motor plans for those skills. However, one of the active research challenge still remains to sustain manipulation capabilities in situation of a mechanical failure. Ideally, like biological creatures, a robotic agent should be able to reconfigure its control policy by adapting to dynamic adversaries. In this paper, we propose a method that allows an agent to survive in a situation of mechanical loss, and adaptively learn manipulation with compromised degrees of freedom -- we call our method Survivable Robotic Learning (SRL). Our key idea is to leverage Bayesian policy gradient by encoding knowledge bias in posterior estimation, which in turn alleviates future policy search explorations, in terms of sample efficiency and when compared to random exploration based policy search methods. SRL represents policy priors as Gaussian process, which allows tractable computation of approximate posterior (when true gradient is intractable), by incorporating guided bias as proxy from prior replays. We evaluate our proposed method against off-the-shelf model free learning algorithm (DDPG), testing on a hexapod robot platform which encounters incremental failure emulation, and our experiments show that our method improves largely in terms of sample requirement and quantitative success ratio in all failure modes. A demonstration video of our experiments can be viewed at: https://sites.google.com/view/survivalrl

Sayyed Jaffar Ali Raza, Apan Dastider, Mingjie Lin

In this paper we present a Bayesian reinforcement learning framework that allows robotic manipulators to adaptively recover from random mechanical failures autonomously, hence being survivable. To this end, we formulate the framework of Bayesian Policy Morphing (BPM) that enables a robot agent to self-modify its learned policy after the diminution of its maneuvering dimensionality. We build upon existing actor-critic framework, and extend it to perform policy gradient updates as posterior learning, taking past policy updates as prior distributions. We show that policy search, in the direction biased by prior experience, significantly improves learning efficiency in terms of sampling requirements. We demonstrate our results on an 8-DOF robotic arm with our algorithm of BPM, while intentionally disabling random joints with different damage types like unresponsive joints, constant offset errors and angular imprecision. Our results have shown that, even with physical damages, the robotic arm can still successfully maintain its functionality to accurately locate and grasp a given target object.