NRI: INT: Collaborative Research: Buoyancy-assisted Collaborative Robots That are Cheap, Safe, and Never Fall Down.

NRI：INT：协作研究：廉价、安全且永不摔倒的浮力辅助协作机器人。

• 批准号: 2024768
• 负责人: Sehoon Ha
• 金额: $ 49.7万
• 依托单位: Georgia Tech Research Corporation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-10-01 至 2025-09-30
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2024768&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: NRI; INT; Collaborative; Research; Buoyancy

This National Robotics Initiative project will promote the progress of science, advance the national prosperity, welfare, and security; by developing novel buoyancy-assisted collaborative robots that are cheap, safe, and never fall down. The current state of robotics systems is not ready to be deployable to human daily environments, which are challenging for a robot to navigate, especially for legged robots. While they are naturally well-suited for human environments by design, legged robots are often too expensive to scale up for a multi-agent setup, heavy and dangerous to operate near humans, and hard to guarantee stable locomotion. To this end, the ultimate goal of this research is to build collaborative robots that are cheap, safe, and never fall down by exploiting buoyancy to defy a significant amount of gravity This research has the potential for significant impact in enabling deployed locomotion for safe robotic systems interactively assisting humans in daily environments. It provides a principled way for leveraging large amounts of safe and scalable hardware designs with recent advances in machine learning techniques to develop compact representations that are transferable across different robotic systems and human environments. This will innovate how one can utilize a deployable multi-agent system in disaster relief zones and large outdoor environments. The project team will invite general public participation by publicizing the hardware designs and open-sourcing all the deployed software infrastructure. The grant will also support a competition for middle and high school students using the developed low-cost platforms with the goal to foster students’ interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Creating a new class of locomotion systems has two major challenges: designing a new hardware that is cheap and safe and developing an algorithm for locomotion and collaboration. In order to address these two challenges, this grant will support development of a novel framework that (1) addresses a fundamentally new family of legged robots, namely buoyancy assisted robots (BARs), which are constantly stood-up and highly light-weight by leveraging the inherent "lifting power" of buoyancy; and (2) empowers BARs with reliable locomotion and collaboration skills using deep reinforcement learning algorithms. To this end, the research team will perform interrelated research thrusts centered around the goal of safe, scalable multi-robot systems: developing multiple BARs with each unique locomotion style, learning primitive motor skills for a single agent, extending individually trained agents to orchestrate in a large-scale multi-agent friendly environment.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

这个国家机器人计划项目将促进科学的进步，促进国家的繁荣，福利和安全;通过开发新颖的浮力辅助协作机器人，廉价，安全，永不倒下。机器人系统的当前状态还没有准备好部署到人类日常环境中，这对于机器人来说是具有挑战性的导航，特别是对于腿式机器人。 虽然它们在设计上自然适合人类环境，但腿式机器人通常过于昂贵，无法扩展到多智能体设置，在人类附近操作又重又危险，并且难以保证稳定的运动。为此，这项研究的最终目标是建立廉价，安全，永远不会倒下的协作机器人，利用浮力来对抗大量的重力。这项研究有可能对安全的机器人系统在日常环境中交互式地协助人类的部署运动产生重大影响。它提供了一种原则性的方法，利用大量安全和可扩展的硬件设计以及机器学习技术的最新进展，开发可在不同机器人系统和人类环境中转移的紧凑表示。这将创新人们如何在救灾地区和大型户外环境中利用可部署的多智能体系统。项目团队将通过公布硬件设计和开放所有已部署的软件基础设施来邀请公众参与。这笔赠款还将支持使用开发的低成本平台为初中和高中学生举办的竞赛，目的是培养学生对科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）的兴趣。创建一个新的运动系统有两个主要的挑战：设计一个新的硬件，是廉价和安全的，并开发一个算法的运动和协作。为了解决这两个挑战，这笔赠款将支持开发一个新的框架，该框架（1）解决了一个全新的腿式机器人家族，即浮力辅助机器人（BAR），通过利用浮力的固有“提升力”，这些机器人不断站立，重量非常轻;（2）使用深度强化学习算法为BAR提供可靠的运动和协作技能。为此，研究团队将围绕安全、可扩展的多机器人系统的目标进行相关的研究：为每个独特的运动风格开发多个BAR，为单个代理学习原始运动技能，将单独训练的代理扩展到大规模的多-该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的评估被认为值得支持。影响审查标准。

项目成果

PM-FSM: Policies Modulating Finite State Machine for Robust Quadrupedal Locomotion

• DOI: 10.1109/iros47612.2022.9982259
• 发表时间: 2021-09
• 期刊: 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
• 作者: Ren Liu;Nitish Sontakke;Sehoon Ha