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

这项国家机器人行动计划将促进科学进步，促进国家繁荣、福利和安全；通过开发新型的浮力辅助协作机器人，这些机器人便宜、安全，而且永远不会摔倒。机器人系统目前的状态还没有准备好部署到人类的日常环境中，这对机器人来说是一个挑战，特别是对于有腿的机器人。虽然它们天生就很适合人类环境，但腿式机器人往往过于昂贵，无法扩展到多智能体的设置中，在人类附近操作又重又危险，而且很难保证稳定的运动。为此，本研究的最终目标是通过利用浮力来对抗大量的重力，构建廉价、安全且永不坠落的协作机器人。这项研究在实现安全机器人系统在日常环境中交互式协助人类的部署运动方面具有重大影响。它为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来开发可在不同机器人系统和人类环境之间转移的紧凑表示提供了一种原则性方法。这将创新如何在救灾区域和大型户外环境中利用可部署的多代理系统。项目团队将通过公开硬件设计和开放所有已部署软件基础设施的源代码来邀请公众参与。拨款还将支持初中和高中学生使用开发的低成本平台的竞赛，目的是培养学生对科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）的兴趣。创造一种新型的运动系统有两个主要的挑战：设计一种廉价和安全的新硬件，开发一种运动和协作的算法。为了应对这两个挑战，这笔拨款将支持开发一种新的框架，该框架(1)解决了一种全新的有腿机器人家族，即浮力辅助机器人（BARs），它通过利用浮力固有的“提升力”，不断站立，重量非常轻；(2)使用深度强化学习算法赋予bar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：开发具有每种独特运动风格的多个bar，学习单个智能体的原始运动技能，扩展单独训练的智能体在大规模多智能体友好环境中的协调。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.