Andy Ruina, Cornell University
9/11/18
These are unpublished thoughts, actually more questions than thoughts.And not all that well informed. So audience feedback is welcome. Especially from people who know about how to formulate machine learning problems
(I already know, sort of, how to formulate MatSheen learning problems).One posing of many robotics control problems is as a general problem in `motor control’ (a biological term, I think).Assume one has a machine and the best model (something one can compute simulations with) one can actually get of the machine, its environment, its sensors and its computation abilities. One also has some sense of the uncertainty in various aspects of these.The general motor problem is this: Given a history of sensor readings and requested goals (commands), and all of the givens above, what computation should be done to determine the motor commands so as to best achieve the goals.”Best” means, most accurately and most reliably by whatever measures one chooses.If one poses this as an optimization problem over the space of all controllers (all mappings from command and sensor histories to the set of commands), it is too big a problem, even if coarsely discretized.Hence, everyone applies all manner of assumed simplifications before attempting to make a controller.The question here is this, can one pose an optimization problem for the best simplification? Can one pose it in a way such that finding a useful approximate solution could be useful?In bipedal robots there are various classes of simplified models used by various people to attempt to control their robots. Might there be a rational way to choose between them, or find better ones?As abstract as this all sounds, perhaps thinking about such things could help us make better walking-robot controllers.