Bo Zhou

Haojie Shi, Bo Zhou, Hongsheng Zeng et al.

Recently reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for quadrupedal locomotion, which can save the manual effort in conventional approaches such as designing skill-specific controllers. However, due to the complex nonlinear dynamics in quadrupedal robots and reward sparsity, it is still difficult for RL to learn effective gaits from scratch, especially in challenging tasks such as walking over the balance beam. To alleviate such difficulty, we propose a novel RL-based approach that contains an evolutionary foot trajectory generator. Unlike prior methods that use a fixed trajectory generator, the generator continually optimizes the shape of the output trajectory for the given task, providing diversified motion priors to guide the policy learning. The policy is trained with reinforcement learning to output residual control signals that fit different gaits. We then optimize the trajectory generator and policy network alternatively to stabilize the training and share the exploratory data to improve sample efficiency. As a result, our approach can solve a range of challenging tasks in simulation by learning from scratch, including walking on a balance beam and crawling through the cave. To further verify the effectiveness of our approach, we deploy the controller learned in the simulation on a 12-DoF quadrupedal robot, and it can successfully traverse challenging scenarios with efficient gaits.

Łukasz Kidziński, Carmichael Ong, Sharada Prasanna Mohanty et al.

In the NeurIPS 2018 Artificial Intelligence for Prosthetics challenge, participants were tasked with building a controller for a musculoskeletal model with a goal of matching a given time-varying velocity vector. Top participants were invited to describe their algorithms. In this work, we describe the challenge and present thirteen solutions that used deep reinforcement learning approaches. Many solutions use similar relaxations and heuristics, such as reward shaping, frame skipping, discretization of the action space, symmetry, and policy blending. However, each team implemented different modifications of the known algorithms by, for example, dividing the task into subtasks, learning low-level control, or by incorporating expert knowledge and using imitation learning.

Monit Shah Singh, Vinaychandran Pondenkandath, Bo Zhou et al.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become the state-of-the-art in various computer vision tasks, but they are still premature for most sensor data, especially in pervasive and wearable computing. A major reason for this is the limited amount of annotated training data. In this paper, we propose the idea of leveraging the discriminative power of pre-trained deep CNNs on 2-dimensional sensor data by transforming the sensor modality to the visual domain. By three proposed strategies, 2D sensor output is converted into pressure distribution imageries. Then we utilize a pre-trained CNN for transfer learning on the converted imagery data. We evaluate our method on a gait dataset of floor surface pressure mapping. We obtain a classification accuracy of 87.66%, which outperforms the conventional machine learning methods by over 10%.