Related papers: A Theory of Cheap Control in Embodied Systems
Embodied agents are evolving from passive reasoning systems into active executors that interact with tools, robots, and physical environments. Once granted execution authority, the central challenge becomes how to keep actions governable at…
Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together over time. In contrast, in AI and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that fixed design. The…
In this paper, we consider finite model approximations of a large class of static and dynamic team problems where these models are constructed through uniform quantization of the observation and action spaces of the agents. The strategies…
Approximate computing is a computation domain which can be used to trade time and energy with quality and therefore is useful in embedded systems. Energy is the prime resource in battery-driven embedded systems, like robots. Approximate…
Reduced-order template models are widely used to control high degree-of-freedom legged robots, but existing methods for template-based whole-body control rely heavily on heuristics and often suffer from robustness issues. In this letter, we…
World models of embodied agents predict future observations conditioned on an action taken by the agent. For complex embodiments, action spaces are high-dimensional and difficult to specify: for example, precisely controlling a human agent…
We consider stochastic model predictive control of a multi-agent systems with constraints on the probabilities of inter-agent collisions. We first study a sample-based approximation of the collision probabilities and use this approximation…
The behavior composition problem involves automatically building a controller that is able to realize a desired, but unavailable, target system (e.g., a house surveillance) by suitably coordinating a set of available components (e.g., video…
Spatial reasoning in partially observable environments has often been approached through passive predictive models, yet theories of embodied cognition suggest that genuinely useful representations arise only when perception is tightly…
In the real world, robots with embodiment face various issues such as dynamic continuous changes of the environment and input/output disturbances. The key to solving these issues can be found in daily life; people `do actions associated…
Designing effective embodied multi-agent systems is critical for solving complex real-world tasks across domains. Due to the complexity of multi-agent embodied systems, existing methods fail to automatically generate safe and efficient…
Learning how to navigate among humans in an occluded and spatially constrained indoor environment, is a key ability required to embodied agent to be integrated into our society. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end architecture that…
At the intersection of dynamical systems, control theory, and formal methods lies the construction of symbolic abstractions: these typically represent simpler, finite-state models whose behavior mimics that of an underlying concrete system…
An embodied agent constantly influences its environment and is influenced by it. We use the sensorimotor loop to model these interactions and thereby we can quantify different information flows in the system by various information theoretic…
Despite significant research, robotic swarms have yet to be useful in solving real-world problems, largely due to the difficulty of creating and controlling swarming behaviors in multi-agent systems. Traditional top-down approaches in which…
Equipping approximate dynamic programming (ADP) with inputconstraints has a tremendous significance. This enables ADP to be applied tothe systems with actuator limitations, which is quite common for dynamicalsystems. In a conventional…
In this paper, we will argue that if we want to understand the function of the brain (or the control in the case of robots), we must understand how the brain is embedded into the physical system, and how the organism interacts with the real…
Approximate simulation, an extension of simulation relations from formal methods to continuous systems, is a powerful tool for hierarchical control of complex systems. Finding an approximate simulation relation between the full "concrete"…
This paper tackles the problem of how to pre-train a model and make it generally reusable backbones for downstream task learning. In pre-training, we propose a method that builds an agent-environment interaction model by learning domain…
Effective control requires knowledge of the process dynamics to guide the system toward desired states. In many control applications this knowledge is expressed mathematically or through data-driven models, however, as complexity grows…