Learning-based Hierarchical Control: Emulating the Central Nervous System for Bio-Inspired Legged Robot Locomotion

Animals possess a remarkable ability to navigate challenging terrains, achieved through the interplay of various pathways between the brain, central pattern generators (CPGs) in the spinal cord, and musculoskeletal system. Traditional bioinspired control frameworks often rely on a singular control policy that models both higher (supraspinal) and spinal cord functions. In this work, we build upon our previous research by introducing two distinct neural networks: one tasked with modulating the frequency and amplitude of CPGs to generate the basic locomotor rhythm (referred to as the spinal policy, SCP), and the other responsible for receiving environmental perception data and directly modulating the rhythmic output from the SCP to execute precise movements on challenging terrains (referred to as the descending modulation policy). This division of labor more closely mimics the hierarchical locomotor control systems observed in legged animals, thereby enhancing the robot's ability to navigate various uneven surfaces, including steps, high obstacles, and terrains with gaps. Additionally, we investigate the impact of sensorimotor delays within our framework, validating several biological assumptions about animal locomotion systems. Specifically, we demonstrate that spinal circuits play a crucial role in generating the basic locomotor rhythm, while descending pathways are essential for enabling appropriate gait modifications to accommodate uneven terrain. Notably, our findings also reveal that the multi-layered control inherent in animals exhibits remarkable robustness against time delays. Through these investigations, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the fundamental principles of interplay between spinal and supraspinal mechanisms in biological locomotion. It also supports the development of locomotion controllers in parallel to biological structures which are ...

Dragtraffic: A Non-Expert Interactive and Point-Based Controllable Traffic Scene Generation Framework

The evaluation and training of autonomous driving systems require diverse and scalable corner cases. However, most existing scene generation methods lack controllability, accuracy, and versatility, resulting in unsatisfactory generation results. To address this problem, we propose Dragtraffic, a generalized, point-based, and controllable traffic scene generation framework based on conditional diffusion. Dragtraffic enables non-experts to generate a variety of realistic driving scenarios for different types of traffic agents through an adaptive mixture expert architecture. We use a regression model to provide a general initial solution and a refinement process based on the conditional diffusion model to ensure diversity. User-customized context is introduced through cross-attention to ensure high controllability. Experiments on a real-world driving dataset show that Dragtraffic outperforms existing methods in terms of authenticity, diversity, and freedom.

Enhancing Campus Mobility: Achievements and Challenges of Autonomous Shuttle "Snow Lion''

The rapid evolution of autonomous vehicles (AVs) has significantly influenced global transportation systems. In this context, we present ``Snow Lion'', an autonomous shuttle meticulously designed to revolutionize on-campus transportation, offering a safer and more efficient mobility solution for students, faculty, and visitors. The primary objective of this research is to enhance campus mobility by providing a reliable, efficient, and eco-friendly transportation solution that seamlessly integrates with existing infrastructure and meets the diverse needs of a university setting. To achieve this goal, we delve into the intricacies of the system design, encompassing sensing, perception, localization, planning, and control aspects. We evaluate the autonomous shuttle's performance in real-world scenarios, involving a 1146-kilometer road haul and the transportation of 442 passengers over a two-month period. These experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our system and offer valuable insights into the intricate process of integrating an autonomous vehicle within campus shuttle operations. Furthermore, a thorough analysis of the lessons derived from this experience furnishes a valuable real-world case study, accompanied by recommendations for future research and development in the field of autonomous driving.

GBD-TS: Goal-based Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction with Diffusion using Tree Sampling Algorithm

Predicting pedestrian trajectories is crucial for improving the safety and effectiveness of autonomous driving and mobile robots. However, this task is nontrivial due to the inherent stochasticity of human motion, which naturally requires the predictor to generate multi-model prediction. Previous works have used various generative methods, such as GAN and VAE, for pedestrian trajectory prediction. Nevertheless, these methods may suffer from problems, including mode collapse and relatively low-quality results. The denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) has recently been applied to trajectory prediction due to its simple training process and powerful reconstruction ability. However, current diffusion-based methods are straightforward without fully leveraging input information and usually require many denoising iterations leading to a long inference time or an additional network for initialization. To address these challenges and promote the application of diffusion models in trajectory prediction, we propose a novel scene-aware multi-modal pedestrian trajectory prediction framework called GBD. GBD combines goal prediction with the diffusion network. First, the goal predictor produces multiple goals, and then the diffusion network generates multi-modal trajectories conditioned on these goals. Furthermore, we introduce a new diffusion sampling algorithm named tree sampling (TS), which leverages common feature to reduce the inference time and improve accuracy for multi-modal prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that our GBD-TS method achieves state-of-the-art performance with real-time inference speed.

DecAP: Decaying Action Priors for Accelerated Learning of Torque-Based Legged Locomotion Policies

Optimal Control for legged robots has gone through a paradigm shift from position-based to torque-based control, owing to the latter's compliant and robust nature. In parallel to this shift, the community has also turned to Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) as a promising approach to directly learn locomotion policies for complex real-life tasks. However, most end-to-end DRL approaches still operate in position space, mainly because learning in torque space is often sample-inefficient and does not consistently converge to natural gaits. To address these challenges, we introduce Decaying Action Priors (DecAP), a novel three-stage framework to learn and deploy torque policies for legged locomotion. In the first stage, we generate our own imitation data by training a position policy, eliminating the need for expert knowledge in designing optimal controllers. The second stage incorporates decaying action priors to enhance the exploration of torque-based policies aided by imitation rewards. We show that our approach consistently outperforms imitation learning alone and is significantly robust to the scaling of these rewards. Finally, our third stage facilitates safe sim-to-real transfer by directly deploying our learned torques, alongside low-gain PID control from our trained position policy. We demonstrate the generality of our approach by training torque-based locomotion policies for a biped, a quadruped, and a hexapod robot in simulation, and experimentally demonstrate our learned policies on a quadruped (Unitree Go1).

Prediction of Diblock Copolymer Morphology via Machine Learning

A machine learning approach is presented to accelerate the computation of block polymer morphology evolution for large domains over long timescales. The strategy exploits the separation of characteristic times between coarse-grained particle evolution on the monomer scale and slow morphological evolution over mesoscopic scales. In contrast to empirical continuum models, the proposed approach learns stochastically driven defect annihilation processes directly from particle-based simulations. A UNet architecture that respects different boundary conditions is adopted, thereby allowing periodic and fixed substrate boundary conditions of arbitrary shape. Physical concepts are also introduced via the loss function and symmetries are incorporated via data augmentation. The model is validated using three different use cases. Explainable artificial intelligence methods are applied to visualize the morphology evolution over time. This approach enables the generation of large system sizes and long trajectories to investigate defect densities and their evolution under different types of confinement. As an application, we demonstrate the importance of accessing late-stage morphologies for understanding particle diffusion inside a single block. This work has implications for directed self-assembly and materials design in micro-electronics, battery materials, and membranes.

Legged Robots for Object Manipulation: A Review

Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments, many legged platform demonstrations have also included "moving an object" as a way of doing tangible work. Legged robots can be designed to manipulate a particular type of object (e.g., a cardboard box, a soccer ball, or a larger piece of furniture), by themselves or collaboratively. The objective of this review is to collect and learn from these examples, to both organize the work done so far in the community and highlight interesting open avenues for future work. This review categorizes existing works into four main manipulation methods: object interactions without grasping, manipulation with walking legs, dedicated non-locomotive arms, and legged teams. Each method has different design and autonomy features, which are illustrated by available examples in the literature. Based on a few simplifying assumptions, we further provide quantitative comparisons for the range of possible relative sizes of the manipulated object with respect to the robot. Taken together, these examples suggest new directions for research in legged robot manipulation, such as multifunctional limbs, terrain modeling, or learning-based control, to support a number of new deployments in challenging indoor/outdoor scenarios in warehouses/construction sites, preserved natural areas, and especially for home robotics.