Zhenzhong Jia

Wenyao Zhang, Shipeng Lv, Feng Xue et al.

Robot mobility is critical for mission success, especially in soft or deformable terrains, where the complex wheel-soil interaction mechanics often leads to excessive wheel slip and sinkage, causing the eventual mission failure. To improve the success rate, online mobility prediction using vision, infrared imaging, or model-based stochastic methods have been used in the literature. This paper proposes an on-board mobility prediction approach using an articulated wheeled bevameter that consists of a force-controlled arm and an instrumented bevameter (with force and vision sensors) as its end-effector. The proposed bevameter, which emulates the traditional terramechanics tests such as pressure-sinkage and shear experiments, can measure contact parameters ahead of the rover's body in real-time, and predict the slip and sinkage of supporting wheels over the probed region. Based on the predicted mobility, the rover can select a safer path in order to avoid dangerous regions such as those covered with quicksand. Compared to the literature, our proposed method can avoid the complicated terramechanics modeling and time-consuming stochastic prediction; it can also mitigate the inaccuracy issues arising in non-contact vision-based methods. We also conduct multiple experiments to validate the proposed approach.

Chen Yao, Zhenzhong Jia

In this paper, we present a effective state estimation algorithm that combined with various sensors information (Inertial measurement unit, joints encoder, camera and LIDAR)

Yifan Hou, Zhenzhong Jia, Matthew T. Mason

A shared grasp is a grasp formed by contacts between the manipulated object and both the robot hand and the environment. By trading off hand contacts for environmental contacts, a shared grasp requires fewer contacts with the hand, and enables manipulation even when a full grasp is not possible. Previous research has used shared grasps for non-prehensile manipulation such as pivoting and tumbling. This paper treats the problem more generally, with methods to select the best shared grasp and robot actions for a desired object motion. The central issue is to evaluate the feasible contact modes: for each contact, whether that contact will remain active, and whether slip will occur. Robustness is important. When a contact mode fails, e.g., when a contact is lost, or when unintentional slip occurs, the operation will fail, and in some cases damage may occur. In this work, we enumerate all feasible contact modes, calculate corresponding controls, and select the most robust candidate. We can also optimize the contact geometry for robustness. This paper employs quasi-static analysis of planar rigid bodies with Coulomb friction to derive the algorithms and controls. Finally, we demonstrate the robustness of shared grasping and the use of our methods in representative experiments and examples. The video can be found at https://youtu.be/tyNhJvRYZNk

Yifan Hou, Zhenzhong Jia, Matthew T. Mason

We consider the problem of reorienting a rigid object with arbitrary known shape on a table using a two-finger pinch gripper. Reorienting problem is challenging because of its non-smoothness and high dimensionality. In this work, we focus on solving reorienting using pivoting, in which we allow the grasped object to rotate between fingers. Pivoting decouples the gripper rotation from the object motion, making it possible to reorient an object under strict robot workspace constraints. We provide detailed mechanical analysis to the 3D pivoting motion on a table, which leads to simple geometric conditions for its stability. To solve reorienting problems, we introduce two motion primitives: pivot-on-support and roll-on-support, and provide an efficient hierarchical motion planning algorithm with the two motion primitives to solve for the gripper motions that reorient an object between arbitrary poses. To handle the uncertainties in modeling and perception, we make conservative plans that work in the worst case, and propose a robust control strategy for executing the motion plan. Finally we discuss the mechanical requirements on the robot and provide a "two-phase" gripper design to implement both pivoting grasp and firm grasp. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in simulations and multiple experiments. Our algorithm can solve more reorienting problems with fewer making and breaking contacts, when compared to traditional pick-and-place based methods.

Zhaoyuan Gu, Zhenzhong Jia, Howie Choset

Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic (A3C) is an effective Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm for a wide range of tasks, such as Atari games and robot control. The agent learns policies and value function through trial-and-error interactions with the environment until converging to an optimal policy. Robustness and stability are critical in RL; however, neural network can be vulnerable to noise from unexpected sources and is not likely to withstand very slight disturbances. We note that agents generated from mild environment using A3C are not able to handle challenging environments. Learning from adversarial examples, we proposed an algorithm called Adversary Robust A3C (AR-A3C) to improve the agent's performance under noisy environments. In this algorithm, an adversarial agent is introduced to the learning process to make it more robust against adversarial disturbances, thereby making it more adaptive to noisy environments. Both simulations and real-world experiments are carried out to illustrate the stability of the proposed algorithm. The AR-A3C algorithm outperforms A3C in both clean and noisy environments.

Jingliang Duan, Zhengyu Liu, Shengbo Eben Li et al.

This paper presents a constrained adaptive dynamic programming (CADP) algorithm to solve general nonlinear nonaffine optimal control problems with known dynamics. Unlike previous ADP algorithms, it can directly deal with problems with state constraints. Firstly, a constrained generalized policy iteration (CGPI) framework is developed to handle state constraints by transforming the traditional policy improvement process into a constrained policy optimization problem. Next, we propose an actor-critic variant of CGPI, called CADP, in which both policy and value functions are approximated by multi-layer neural networks to directly map the system states to control inputs and value function, respectively. CADP linearizes the constrained optimization problem locally into a quadratically constrained linear programming problem, and then obtains the optimal update of the policy network by solving its dual problem. A trust region constraint is added to prevent excessive policy update, thus ensuring linearization accuracy. We determine the feasibility of the policy optimization problem by calculating the minimum trust region boundary and update the policy using two recovery rules when infeasible. The vehicle control problem in the path-tracking task is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of this proposed method.

Peng Yin, Rangaprasad Arun Srivatsan, Yin Chen et al.

Place recognition and loop closure detection are challenging for long-term visual navigation tasks. SeqSLAM is considered to be one of the most successful approaches to achieving long-term localization under varying environmental conditions and changing viewpoints. It depends on a brute-force, time-consuming sequential matching method. We propose MRS-VPR, a multi-resolution, sampling-based place recognition method, which can significantly improve the matching efficiency and accuracy in sequential matching. The novelty of this method lies in the coarse-to-fine searching pipeline and a particle filter-based global sampling scheme, that can balance the matching efficiency and accuracy in the long-term navigation task. Moreover, our model works much better than SeqSLAM when the testing sequence has a much smaller scale than the reference sequence. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient in locating short temporary trajectories within long-term reference ones without losing accuracy compared to SeqSLAM.