Fusion for robot perception and control

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract
Humans have long dreamed of robots that can perform a wide variety of tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, and exploring potentially dangerous environments. However, robotics adoption still struggles even in highly-structured environments. In factories, robots currently account for less than one third of the manufacturing workforce. Because many robots need to be hardcoded for every task, they often cannot deal with any errors in their models nor any changes to the environment. In academic research, recent works in machine learning are enabling robots to learn directly from data. Particularly in the areas of learning-based perception and control, we see advancements in deep learning for visual perception from raw images as well as deep reinforcement learning (RL) for learning complex skills from trial and error. However, these black-box techniques often require large amounts of data, have difficult-to-interpret results and processes, and fail catastrophically when dealing with out-of-distribution data. In order to create robotic systems that can flexibly operate in dynamic environments, we want robot perception and control algorithms that have three characteristics: sample efficiency, robustness, and generalizability. In this dissertation, I introduce the concept of ''fusion'' in robot perception and control algorithms to achieve these three characteristics. On the perception side, we fuse multiple sensor modalities and demonstrate generalization to new task instances and robustness to sensor failures. On the control side, we leverage fusion by combining known models with learned policies, making our policy learning substantially more sample efficient.

Description

Type of resource text
Form electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource
Extent 1 online resource.
Place California
Place [Stanford, California]
Publisher [Stanford University]
Copyright date 2021; ©2021
Publication date 2021; 2021
Issuance monographic
Language English

Creators/Contributors

Author Lee, Michelle Annabel
Degree supervisor Bohg, Jeannette, 1981-
Degree supervisor Okamura, Allison
Thesis advisor Bohg, Jeannette, 1981-
Thesis advisor Okamura, Allison
Thesis advisor Li, Fei Fei, 1976-
Degree committee member Li, Fei Fei, 1976-
Associated with Stanford University, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Subjects

Genre Theses
Genre Text

Bibliographic information

Statement of responsibility Michelle A. Lee.
Note Submitted to the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Thesis Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021.
Location https://purl.stanford.edu/pw700fk3337

Access conditions

Copyright
© 2021 by Michelle Annabel Lee
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).

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