Shared control–based bimanual robot manipulation

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (30) ◽  
pp. eaaw0955 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Rakita ◽  
Bilge Mutlu ◽  
Michael Gleicher ◽  
Laura M. Hiatt

Human-centered environments provide affordances for and require the use of two-handed, or bimanual, manipulations. Robots designed to function in, and physically interact with, these environments have not been able to meet these requirements because standard bimanual control approaches have not accommodated the diverse, dynamic, and intricate coordinations between two arms to complete bimanual tasks. In this work, we enabled robots to more effectively perform bimanual tasks by introducing a bimanual shared-control method. The control method moves the robot’s arms to mimic the operator’s arm movements but provides on-the-fly assistance to help the user complete tasks more easily. Our method used a bimanual action vocabulary, constructed by analyzing how people perform two-hand manipulations, as the core abstraction level for reasoning about how to assist in bimanual shared autonomy. The method inferred which individual action from the bimanual action vocabulary was occurring using a sequence-to-sequence recurrent neural network architecture and turned on a corresponding assistance mode, signals introduced into the shared-control loop designed to make the performance of a particular bimanual action easier or more efficient. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through two user studies that show that novice users could control a robot to complete a range of complex manipulation tasks more successfully using our method compared to alternative approaches. We discuss the implications of our findings for real-world robot control scenarios.

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (10) ◽  
pp. 54-62
Author(s):  
Oleksii VASYLIEV ◽  

The problem of applying neural networks to calculate ratings used in banking in the decision-making process on granting or not granting loans to borrowers is considered. The task is to determine the rating function of the borrower based on a set of statistical data on the effectiveness of loans provided by the bank. When constructing a regression model to calculate the rating function, it is necessary to know its general form. If so, the task is to calculate the parameters that are included in the expression for the rating function. In contrast to this approach, in the case of using neural networks, there is no need to specify the general form for the rating function. Instead, certain neural network architecture is chosen and parameters are calculated for it on the basis of statistical data. Importantly, the same neural network architecture can be used to process different sets of statistical data. The disadvantages of using neural networks include the need to calculate a large number of parameters. There is also no universal algorithm that would determine the optimal neural network architecture. As an example of the use of neural networks to determine the borrower's rating, a model system is considered, in which the borrower's rating is determined by a known non-analytical rating function. A neural network with two inner layers, which contain, respectively, three and two neurons and have a sigmoid activation function, is used for modeling. It is shown that the use of the neural network allows restoring the borrower's rating function with quite acceptable accuracy.


AI ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-273
Author(s):  
Mario Manzo ◽  
Simone Pellino

COVID-19 has been a great challenge for humanity since the year 2020. The whole world has made a huge effort to find an effective vaccine in order to save those not yet infected. The alternative solution is early diagnosis, carried out through real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests or thorax Computer Tomography (CT) scan images. Deep learning algorithms, specifically convolutional neural networks, represent a methodology for image analysis. They optimize the classification design task, which is essential for an automatic approach with different types of images, including medical. In this paper, we adopt a pretrained deep convolutional neural network architecture in order to diagnose COVID-19 disease from CT images. Our idea is inspired by what the whole of humanity is achieving, as the set of multiple contributions is better than any single one for the fight against the pandemic. First, we adapt, and subsequently retrain for our assumption, some neural architectures that have been adopted in other application domains. Secondly, we combine the knowledge extracted from images by the neural architectures in an ensemble classification context. Our experimental phase is performed on a CT image dataset, and the results obtained show the effectiveness of the proposed approach with respect to the state-of-the-art competitors.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 1792
Author(s):  
Juan Hagad ◽  
Tsukasa Kimura ◽  
Ken-ichi Fukui ◽  
Masayuki Numao

Two of the biggest challenges in building models for detecting emotions from electroencephalography (EEG) devices are the relatively small amount of labeled samples and the strong variability of signal feature distributions between different subjects. In this study, we propose a context-generalized model that tackles the data constraints and subject variability simultaneously using a deep neural network architecture optimized for normally distributed subject-independent feature embeddings. Variational autoencoders (VAEs) at the input level allow the lower feature layers of the model to be trained on both labeled and unlabeled samples, maximizing the use of the limited data resources. Meanwhile, variational regularization encourages the model to learn Gaussian-distributed feature embeddings, resulting in robustness to small dataset imbalances. Subject-adversarial regularization applied to the bi-lateral features further enforces subject-independence on the final feature embedding used for emotion classification. The results from subject-independent performance experiments on the SEED and DEAP EEG-emotion datasets show that our model generalizes better across subjects than other state-of-the-art feature embeddings when paired with deep learning classifiers. Furthermore, qualitative analysis of the embedding space reveals that our proposed subject-invariant bi-lateral variational domain adversarial neural network (BiVDANN) architecture may improve the subject-independent performance by discovering normally distributed features.


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