CS 287: Advanced Robotics
Fall 2009
Lecture 1: Introduction
Pieter Abbeel
UC Berkeley EECS
www
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~pabbeel/cs287-fa09
Instructor: Pieter Abbeel
Lectures: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30pm-2:00pm,
405 Soda Hall
Office Hours: Thursdays 2:00-3:00pm, and by email
arrangement. In 746 Sutardja Dai Hall
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Announcements
Communication:
Announcements: webpage
Email: [email protected]
Office hours: Thursday 2-3pm + by email
arrangement, 746 SDH
Enrollment:
Undergrads stay after lecture and see me
Class Details
Prerequisites:
Familiarity with mathematical proofs, probability, algorithms,
linear algebra, calculus.
Ability to implement algorithmic ideas in code.
Strong interest in robotics
Work and grading
Four large assignments (4 * 15%)
One smaller assignment (5%)
Open-ended final project (35%)
Collaboration policy: Students may discuss assignments with each
other. However, each student must code up their solutions
independently and write down their answers independently.
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Class Goals
Learn the issues and techniques underneath state of the
art robotic systems
Build and experiment with some of the prevalent
algorithms
Be able to understand research papers in the field
Main conferences: ICRA, IROS, RSS, ISER, ISRR
Main journals: IJRR, T-RO, Autonomous Robots
Try out some ideas / extensions of your own
Lecture outline
Logistics --- questions? [textbook slide forthcoming]
A few sample robotic success stories
Outline of topics to be covered
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Driverless cars
Darpa Grand Challenge
First long-distance driverless car competition
2004: CMU vehicle drove 7.36 out of 150 miles
2005: 5 teams finished, Stanford team won
Darpa Urban Challenge (2007)
Urban environment: other vehicles present
6 teams finished (CMU won)
Ernst Dickmanns / Mercedes Benz: autonomous car on European
highways
Human in car for interventions
Paris highway and 1758km trip Munich -> Odense, lane
changes at up to 140km/h; longest autonomous stretch: 158km
Kalman filtering, Lyapunov, LQR, mapping, (terrain & object recognition)
Autonomous Helicopter Flight
[Coates, Abbeel & Ng]
Kalman filtering, model-predictive control, LQR, system ID, trajectory learning
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Four-legged locomotion
[Kolter, Abbeel & Ng]
inverse reinforcement learning, hierarchical RL, value iteration, receding
horizon control, motion planning
Two-legged locomotion
[Tedrake +al.]
TD learning, policy search, Poincare map, stability
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Mapping [Video from W. Burgard and D. Haehnel]
“baseline” : Raw odometry data + laser range finder scans
Mapping [Video from W. Burgard and D. Haehnel]
FastSLAM: particle filter + occupancy grid mapping
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Mobile Manipulation
[Quigley, Gould, Saxena, Ng + al.]
SLAM, localization, motion planning for navigation and grasping, grasp point
selection, (visual category recognition, speech recognition and synthesis)
Outline of Topics
Control: underactuation, controllability, Lyapunov, dynamic
programming, LQR, feedback linearization, MPC
Estimation: Bayes filters, KF, EKF, UKF, particle filter, occupancy
grid mapping, EKF slam, GraphSLAM, SEIF, FastSLAM
Manipulation and grasping: force closure, grasp point selection,
visual servo-ing, more sub-topics tbd
Reinforcement learning: value iteration, policy iteration, linear
programming, Q learning, TD, value function approximation, Sarsa,
LSTD, LSPI, policy gradient, inverse reinforcement learning, reward
shaping, hierarchical reinforcement learning, inference based
methods, exploration vs. exploitation
Brief coverage of: system identification, simulation, pomdps, k-
armed bandits, separation principle
Case studies: autonomous helicopter, Darpa Grand/Urban
Challenge, walking, mobile manipulation.
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1. Control
Overarching theme: mathematically capture
What makes control problems hard
What techniques do we have available to tackle the
hard problems
E.g.: “Helicopters have underactuated, non-minimum
phase, highly non-linear and stochastic (within our
modeling capabilities) dynamics.”
Hard or easy to control?
1. Control (ctd)
Under-actuated vs. fully actuated
Example: acrobot swing-up and balance task
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1. Control (ctd)
Other mathematical formalizations of what makes some
control problems easy/hard:
Linear vs. non-linear
Minimum-phase vs. non-minimum phase
Deterministic vs. stochastic
Solution and proof techniques we will study:
Lyapunov, dynamic programming, LQR, feedback
linearization, MPC
2. Estimation
Bayes filters: KF, EKF, UKF, particle filter
One of the key estimation problems in robotics:
Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM)
Essence: compute posterior over robot pose(s) and
environment map given
(i) Sensor model
(ii) Robot motion model
Challenge: Computationally impractical to compute
exact posterior because this is a very high-dimensional
distribution to represent
[You will benefit from 281A for this part of the course.]
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3. Grasping and Manipulation
Extensive mathematical theory on grasping: force
closure, types of contact, robustness of grasp
Empirical studies showcasing the relatively small
vocabulary of grasps being used by humans (compared
to the number of degrees of freedom in the human
hand)
Perception: grasp point detection
4. Reinforcement learning
Learning to act, often in discrete state spaces
value iteration, policy iteration, linear programming, Q
learning, TD, value function approximation, Sarsa,
LSTD, LSPI, policy gradient, inverse reinforcement
learning, reward shaping, hierarchical reinforcement
learning, inference based methods, exploration vs.
exploitation
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5. Misc. Topics
system identification: frequency domain vs. time domain
Simulation / FEM
Pomdps
k-armed bandits
separation principle
…
Reading materials
Control
Tedrake lecture notes 6.832:
https://svn.csail.mit.edu/russt_public/6.832/underactuated.pdf
Estimation
Probabilistic Robotics, Thrun, Burgard and Fox.
Manipulation and grasping
-
Reinforcement learning
Sutton and Barto, Reinforcement Learning (free online)
Misc. topics
-
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Next lecture we will start with our study of control!
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