Related papers: Towards Crossing the Reality Gap with Evolved Plas…
Neuromorphic processors like Loihi offer a promising alternative to conventional computing modules for endowing constrained systems like micro air vehicles (MAVs) with robust, efficient and autonomous skills such as take-off and landing,…
Robotic systems driven by artificial muscles present unique challenges due to the nonlinear dynamics of actuators and the complex designs of mechanical structures. Traditional model-based controllers often struggle to achieve desired…
Robotic navigation has historically struggled to reconcile reactive, sensor-based control with the decisive capabilities of model-based planners. This duality becomes critical when the absence of a predominant option among goals leads to…
Learning in simulation and transferring the learned policy to the real world has the potential to enable generalist robots. The key challenge of this approach is to address simulation-to-reality (sim-to-real) gaps. Previous methods often…
Biological neurons and their in-silico emulations for neuromorphic artificial intelligence (AI) use extraordinarily energy-efficient mechanisms, such as spike-based communication and local synaptic plasticity. It remains unclear whether…
This paper demonstrates that a set of behaviours evolved in simulation on a miniature robot (epuck) can be transferred to a much larger scale platform (a virtual Pioneer P3-DX) that also differs in shape, sensor type, sensor configuration…
In mobile robotics, a solid test for adaptation is the ability of a control system to function not only in a diverse number of physical environments, but also on a number of different robotic platforms. This paper demonstrates that a set of…
We successfully evolved a neural network controller that produces dynamic walking in a simulated bipedal robot with compliant actuators, a difficult control problem. The evolutionary evaluation uses a detailed software simulation of a…
A testbed has recently been introduced that evolves controllers for arbitrary hover-capable UAVs, with evaluations occurring directly on the robot. To prepare the testbed for real-world deployment, we investigate the effects of state-space…
Dexterous manipulation has seen remarkable progress in recent years, with policies capable of executing many complex and contact-rich tasks in simulation. However, transferring these policies from simulation to real world remains a…
Understanding cognitive flexibility and task-switching mechanisms in neural systems requires biologically plausible computational models. This tutorial presents a step-by-step approach to constructing a spiking neural network (SNN) that…
One of the challenges of modern neuroscience is creating a "living computer" based on neural networks grown in vitro. Such an artificial device is supposed to perform neurocomputational tasks and interact with the environment when embodied…
This paper addresses the challenges of distributed formation control in multiple mobile robots, introducing a novel approach that enhances real-world practicability. We first introduce a distributed estimator using a variable structure and…
In this paper, an adaptive control scheme based on using neural networks is designed to guarantee the desired behavior of a micro-robot which is equipped with vibrating actuators and follows the principle of slip-stick movement. There are…
Learning-based adaptive control methods hold the premise of enabling autonomous agents to reduce the effect of process variations with minimal human intervention. However, its application to autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) has so far…
We consider a fully-connected network of leaky integrate-and-fire neurons with spike-timing-dependent plasticity. The plasticity is controlled by a parameter representing the expected weight of a synapse between neurons that are firing…
Simulation-to-reality transfer has emerged as a popular and highly successful method to train robotic control policies for a wide variety of tasks. However, it is often challenging to determine when policies trained in simulation are ready…
This paper investigates the development of high-performance racing controllers for a newly implemented racing mode within the Xpilot-AI platform, utilizing the Neuro Evolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) algorithm. By leveraging NEAT's…
Learning-based approaches often outperform hand-coded algorithmic solutions for many problems in robotics. However, learning long-horizon tasks on real robot hardware can be intractable, and transferring a learned policy from simulation to…
Little innovation has been made to low-level attitude flight control used by uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), which still predominantly uses the classical PID controller. In this work we introduce Neuroflight, the first open source…