Tuesday, May 23, 2023 @ 8:00-9:00am PT / 17:00-18:00 CET you are invited to attend an INRC Forum talk from Wallace "Ed" Lawson, Naval Research Lab.

Sigma-Delta Networks for Robot Arm Control

Abstract: Our autonomous robot, Bight, can be a reliable teammate that is capable of assisting in performing routine maintenance tasks on a Naval vessel. In this talk, we consider the task of maintaining the electrical panel. A vital first step is putting the robot into the correct position to view all of the parts of the electrical panel. The robot can get close, but the arm of the robot will need to move to where it can see everything. A second related task is using Bight to fetch the tools needed to perform this task. Here, we propose to solve this using a sigma-delta spiking network that is trained using deep Q learning. Our approach is able to successfully solve this problem at varying distances. While we show how this works on these specific tasks, we believe this is general enough to work with a variety of related tasks.

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Bight in action.

Bio:

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Dr. Wallace "Ed" Lawson is a research scientist at the Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC where has worked since 2004. Dr. Lawson received his PhD in computer science from George Mason University in 2011, studying motion analysis applied to biometrics. In his research, he is interested in using machine learning to solve perception problems in robots. He has also authored publications related to human-robot interaction, biometric person authentication, and surveillance.

Recording:

For the recording, see the full INRC Forum Summer 2023 Schedule (accessible only to INRC Affiliates and Engaged Members).

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