Advances In Robots Trajectories Learning Via Fast Neural Networks

Recent Advances in Robot Learning contains seven papers on robot learning written by leading researchers in the field. As the selection of papers illustrates, the field of robot learning is both active and diverse. A variety of machine learning methods, ranging from inductive logic programming to reinforcement learning, is being applied to many subproblems in robot perception and control, often with objectives as diverse as parameter calibration and concept formulation. While no unified robot learning framework has yet emerged to cover the variety of problems and approaches described in these papers and other publications, a clear set of shared issues underlies many robot learning problems. Machine learning, when applied to robotics, is situated: it is embedded into a real-world system that tightly integrates perception, decision making and execution. Since robot learning involves decision making, there is an inherent active learning issue. Robotic domains are usually complex, yet the expense of using actual robotic hardware often prohibits the collection of large amounts of training data. Most robotic systems are real-time systems. Decisions must be made within critical or practical time constraints. These characteristics present challenges and constraints to the learning system. Since these characteristics are shared by other important real-world application domains, robotics is a highly attractive area for research on machine learning. On the other hand, machine learning is also highly attractive to robotics. There is a great variety of open problems in robotics that defy a static, hand-coded solution. Recent Advances in Robot Learning is an edited volume of peer-reviewed original research comprising seven invited contributions by leading researchers. This research work has also been published as a special issue of Machine Learning (Volume 23, Numbers 2 and 3).

The book offers an insight on artificial neural networks for giving a robot a high level of autonomous tasks, such as navigation, cost mapping, object recognition, intelligent control of ground and aerial robots, and clustering, with real-time implementations. The reader will learn various methodologies that can be used to solve each stage on autonomous navigation for robots, from object recognition, clustering of obstacles, cost mapping of environments, path planning, and vision to low level control. These methodologies include real-life scenarios to implement a wide range of artificial neural network architectures.

This book presents the state of the art in reinforcement learning applied to robotics both in terms of novel algorithms and applications. It discusses recent approaches that allow robots to learn motor. skills and presents tasks that need to take into account the dynamic behavior of the robot and its environment, where a kinematic movement plan is not sufficient. The book illustrates a method that learns to generalize parameterized motor plans which is obtained by imitation or reinforcement learning, by adapting a small set of global parameters and appropriate kernel-based reinforcement learning algorithms. The presented applications explore highly dynamic tasks and exhibit a very efficient learning process. All proposed approaches have been extensively validated with benchmarks tasks, in simulation and on real robots. These tasks correspond to sports and games but the presented techniques are also applicable to more mundane household tasks. The book is based on the first author’s doctoral thesis, which won the 2013 EURON Georges Giralt PhD Award.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 8th European Workshop on Learning Robots, EWLR'99, held in Lausanne, Switzerland in September 1999.The seven revised full workshop papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. Also included are two invited full papers. Among the topics addressed are map building for robot navigation, multi-task reinforcement learning, neural network approaches, example-based learning, situated agents, planning maps for mobile robots, path finding, autonomous robots, and biologically inspired approaches.

"Advances in intelligent Control" is a collection of essays covering the latest research in the field. Based on a special issue of "The International Journal of Control", the book is arranged in two parts. Part one contains recent contributions of artificial neural networks to modelling and control. Part two concerns itself primarily with aspects of fuzzy logic in intelligent control, guidance and estimation, although some of the contributions either make direct equivalence relationships to neural networks or use hybrid methods where a neural network is used to develop the fuzzy rule base.

The field of mechatronics integrates modern engineering science and technologies with new ways of thinking, enhancing the design of products and manufacturing processes. This synergy enables the creation and evolution of new intelligent human-oriented machines. The Handbook of Research on Advancements in Robotics and Mechatronics presents new findings, practices, technological innovations, and theoretical perspectives on the the latest advancements in the field of mechanical engineering. This book is of great use to engineers and scientists, students, researchers, and practitioners looking to develop autonomous and smart products and systems for meeting today’s challenges.