CCNY Lecture Series
Computer Vision, Robotics and Human-Computer
Interaction
Title: Constraint Maintenance in Adaptive Behavior-Based Robot
Systems
Roderic A. Grupen
Professor, Computer Science
Department
Director, Laboratory
for Perceptual Robotics
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Date: Friday, May 13, 2005
Time: 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
Room: Steinman Hall, Room T-512
ABSTRACT
This presentation describes techniques and representations that
facilitate the design of distributed and sensor-based, reactive robot
control policies. Distributed controllers introduce issues regarding
the use of multiple internal models, the management of control
interactions, process synchronization, and communication, but they also
promise to provide practical controllers for complex control tasks
including the coordination of many individuals.
We view these kinds of systems as redundant spatial mechanisms and
construct multi-objective, concurrent controllers by using a
generalization of null-space (pseudoinverse) control. As in many
related approaches, behavior in our approach is expressed by sequences
of control actions. However, in the UMass work, control actions consist
of combinations of control primitives and resource designations. The
basis controllers introduce a finite set of system equilibria, thus
permitting the end-to-end behavior of the system to be modeled as a
discrete event system, which allows powerful formal techniques to be
applied to further structure the behavior of the system. By explicitly
exploring system resources, we acquire control policies that are robust
and responsive to a wide range of operational contexts. Moreover,
stochastic exploration techniques for adaptive optimal control design
can be guaranteed not to violate design constraints.
This perspective has been applied successfully to many kinds of robotic
platforms and as a computational model of sensorimotor development in
human infants during the first year of life. I will illustrate our
approach with several examples drawn from these studies including:
manipulation systems; coordinated policies for mobile robots; and
distributed sensor
networks.
Biography
Professor Grupen is a Professor of Computer Science at the University
of Massachusetts. His primary research interests include: robot
learning and adaptation, sensor-based modeling and control, dexterous
robots, multimodal sensory interpretation, resource allocation, and
architectures for real-time autonomous systems. Grupen received a B.A.
in Physics from Franklin and Marshall College, a M.S. in Mechanical
Engineering from Penn State University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science
from the University of Utah in 1988. Professor Grupen is the Director
of the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics at UMass, an editor for
AIEDAM (AI in Engineering Design and Manufacture), and the Robotics and
Autonomous Systems Journal, and serves on several program committees.
The
lecture series is supported by CCNY School of Engineering, and a
planning grant from NSF Minority Institutional Infrastructure program.