I will be heading to Madrid in October to present at the Human/Robot-in-the-Loop Machine Learning workshop at IROS 2018. The workshop is on Monday October 1. Hope to see you there!
Welcome Brendan Bogar!
Welcome Brendan Bogar to the lab! He will be spending the summer working with us as part of the University of Arizona Undergraduate Research Opportunities Consortium – Summer Research Institute (UROC-SRI) program.
Brendan will be working on building simulations of quadrupedal legged locomotion. This will build on earlier work by Cameron Zawacki, some of which can be seen here.
ICRA 2018
I am on my way to ICRA 2018 to present our work on multirobot foraging using multiarmed bandits. We will be participating in the Monday workshop on Informative Path Planning and Adaptive Sampling. Hope to see you there!
Welcome summer students!
Now that the spring semester is over, we are quickly transitioning to summer research mode. This week, we have welcomed four students:
They are working on lab infrastructure, integrating our motion capture system and a fleet mobile robots using ROS. More updates as the summer, and the work, progresses!
Motivation dynamics simulations
The below two videos show, respectively, the physical state and the full state space of a motivation dynamics agent. The agent is motivated to visit each of the two goal states (red diamonds) while staying in the workspace (the black circle) and avoiding the obstacles (black discs with red circles at their centers).
The motivation dynamics are as described in our SIADS paper. As guaranteed by the analysis in the paper, the closed-loop system exhibits a stable limit cycle where the agent cyclically visits each of the goal states in turn.
Motivation dynamics paper accepted!
Our paper “A dynamical system for prioritizing and coordinating motivations” has been accepted for publication in the SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems. The arXiv preprint has been updated accordingly.
Multirobot foraging with multiarmed bandits
Motivated by applications in multi-robot information gathering, we have developed a distributed multi-agent algorithm for solving graphical multi-armed bandit problems. A video of its implementation on a laboratory test bed is shown below.