This article reviews the current state of the art in the development of modular reconfigurable robot (MRR) systems and suggests promising future research directions. A wide variety of MRR systems have been presented t...
详细信息
This article reviews the current state of the art in the development of modular reconfigurable robot (MRR) systems and suggests promising future research directions. A wide variety of MRR systems have been presented to date, and these robots promise to be versatile, robust, and low cost compared with other conventional robot systems. MRR systems thus have the potential to outperform traditional systems with a fixed morphology when carrying out tasks that require a high level of flexibility. We begin by introducing the taxonomy of MRRs based on their hardware architecture. We then examine recent progress in the hardware and the software technologies for MRRs, along with remaining technical issues. We conclude with a discussion of open challenges and future research directions.
This article is an attempt to reexamine the evolution of robotics research at the University of Pennsylvania and all that it entailed, covering the successes and struggles of PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, an...
详细信息
This article is an attempt to reexamine the evolution of robotics research at the University of Pennsylvania and all that it entailed, covering the successes and struggles of PhD students, postdoctoral researchers, and a few dedicated faculty between 1972 and 2000. In 1945, Penn's Moore School of Electrical engineering was famous for developing the first electronic digital computer, ENIAC, but after a few years, the research had diminished. In 1972, a new department of computer and information Science was formed. I came to Penn from Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory full of energy, enthusiasm, and the goal of establishing a similar lab at Penn. This article demonstrates the creativity and ingenuity of young professionals at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory. We built hardware. We built software. We collaborated with psychologists and electrical and mechanical engineers and tried to build a community of roboticists. Our curiosity led us to build new vision and tactile systems and to investigate cooperative robotics systems on the ground and in the air. We used computational models supported and verified by experiments. Today, I am proud to say that almost all of the students who cycled through the GRASP Lab are successful in academia or industry.
Evolutionary Computation (EC) techniques are e?cient, nature-inspired me- ods based on the principles of natural evolution and genetics. Due to their - ciency and simple underlying principles, these methods can be use...
详细信息
ISBN:
(数字)9783642122392
ISBN:
(纸本)9783642122385
Evolutionary Computation (EC) techniques are e?cient, nature-inspired me- ods based on the principles of natural evolution and genetics. Due to their - ciency and simple underlying principles, these methods can be used for a diverse rangeofactivitiesincludingproblemsolving,optimization,machinelearningand pattern recognition. A large and continuously increasing number of researchers and professionals make use of EC techniques in various application domains. This volume presents a careful selection of relevant EC examples combined with a thorough examination of the techniques used in EC. The papers in the volume illustrate the current state of the art in the application of EC and should help and inspire researchers and professionals to develop e?cient EC methods for design and problem solving. All papers in this book were presented during EvoApplications 2010, which included a range of events on application-oriented aspects of EC. Since 1998, EvoApplications — formerly known as EvoWorkshops— has provided a unique opportunity for EC researchers to meet and discuss application aspects of EC and has been an important link between EC research and its application in a variety of domains. During these 12 years, new events have arisen, some have disappeared,whileothershavematuredtobecomeconferencesoftheirown,such as EuroGP in 2000, EvoCOP in 2004, and EvoBIO in 2007. And from this year, EvoApplications has become a conference as well.
Networked control systems, where feedback loops are closed over communication networks, arise in several domains, including smart energy grids, autonomous driving, unmanned aerial vehicles, and many industrial and rob...
Networked control systems, where feedback loops are closed over communication networks, arise in several domains, including smart energy grids, autonomous driving, unmanned aerial vehicles, and many industrial and robotic systems active in service, production, agriculture, and smart homes and cities. In these settings, the two main layers of the system, control and communication, strongly affect each other's performance, and they also reveal the interaction between a cyber-system component, represented by information-based computing and communication technologies, and a physical-system component, represented by the environment that needs to be controlled. The information access and distribution constraints required to achieve reliable state estimation and stabilization in networked control systems have been intensively studied over the course of roughly two decades. This article reviews some of the cornerstone results in this area, draws a map for what we have learned over these years, and describes the new challenges that we will face in the future. Rather than simply listing different results, we present them in a coherent fashion using a uniform notation, and we also put them in context, highlighting both their theoreticalinsights and their practical significance. Particular attention is given to recent developments related to decentralized estimation in distributed sensing and communication systems and the information-theoretic value of event timing in the context of networked control.
We provide a critical review of macroeconomic models used for monetary policy at central banks from a finance perspective. We review the history of monetary policy modeling, survey the core monetary models used by maj...
We provide a critical review of macroeconomic models used for monetary policy at central banks from a finance perspective. We review the history of monetary policy modeling, survey the core monetary models used by major central banks, and construct an illustrative model for those readers who are unfamiliar with the literature. Within this framework, we highlight several important limitations of current models and methods, including the fact that local-linearization approximations omit important nonlinear dynamics, yielding biased impulse-response analysis and parameter estimates. We also propose new features for the next generation of macrofinancial policy models, including a substantial role for the financial sector, the government balance sheet, and unconventional monetary policies; heterogeneity, reallocation, and redistribution effects;the macroeconomic impact of large nonlinear risk premium dynamics; time-varying uncertainty; financial sector and systemic risks; imperfect product market and markups; and further advances in solution, estimation, and evaluation methods for dynamic quantitative structural models.
Gradient-based methods have been widely used for system design and optimization in diverse application domains. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in studying theoretical properties of these methods in the co...
详细信息
Gradient-based methods have been widely used for system design and optimization in diverse application domains. Recently, there has been a renewed interest in studying theoretical properties of these methods in the context of control and reinforcement learning. This article surveys some of the recent developments on policy optimization, a gradient-based iterative approach for feedback control synthesis that has been popularized by successes of reinforcement learning. We take an interdisciplinary perspective in our exposition that connects control theory, reinforcement learning, and large-scale optimization. We review a number of recently developed theoretical results on the optimization landscape, global convergence, and sample complexityof gradient-based methods for various continuous control problems, such as the linear quadratic regulator (LQR), control, risk-sensitive control, linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control, and output feedback synthesis. In conjunction with these optimization results, we also discuss how direct policy optimization handles stability and robustness concerns in learning-based control, two main desiderata in control engineering. We conclude the survey by pointing out several challenges and opportunities at the intersection of learning and control.
When a direct current (DC) electric field is applied across an ion-selective nanoporous membrane or a nanochannel with an overlapping Debye layer, a surprising microvortex instability occurs on the side of the membran...
When a direct current (DC) electric field is applied across an ion-selective nanoporous membrane or a nanochannel with an overlapping Debye layer, a surprising microvortex instability occurs on the side of the membrane/channel through which counterions enter. Despite its micro and nano length scales, this instability exhibits all the hallmarks of other classical hydrodynamic instabilities—a subharmonic cascade, a wide-band fluctuation spectrum, and a coherent structure dominated by spatiotemporal dynamics. Moreover, the resulting convection enhances the ion flux into the ion-selective medium and gives rise to an overlimiting-current bifurcation in the current-voltage relationship. This hydrodynamically driven nonequilibrium ion flux does not seem to have any equivalent in cell membrane ion channels. Yet, by introducing asymmetric entrances to provide different polarized regions and/or viscous arrest of the vortex instability, one can fabricate a hydrodynamic nanofluidic diode. With other modifications, hysteretic, excitable, and oscillatory ion flux dynamics could also be elicited—all with strong hydrodynamic features.
While the primary sequences of human proteins have been cataloged for over a decade, determining how these are organized into a dynamic collection of multiprotein assemblies, with structures and functions spanning bio...
While the primary sequences of human proteins have been cataloged for over a decade, determining how these are organized into a dynamic collection of multiprotein assemblies, with structures and functions spanning biological scales, is an ongoing venture. Systematic and data-driven analyses of these higher-order structures are emerging, facilitating the discovery and understanding of cellular phenotypes. At present, knowledge of protein localization and function has been primarily derived from manual annotation and curation in resources such as the Gene Ontology, which are biased toward richly annotated genes in the literature. Here, we envision a future powered by data-driven mapping of protein assemblies. These maps can capture and decode cellular functions through the integration of protein expression, localization, and interaction data across length scales and timescales. In this review, we focus on progress toward constructing integrated cell maps that accelerate the life sciences and translational research.
In control theory, complicated dynamics such as systems of (nonlinear) differential equations are controlled mostly to achieve stability. This fundamental property, which can be with respect to a desired operating poi...
In control theory, complicated dynamics such as systems of (nonlinear) differential equations are controlled mostly to achieve stability. This fundamental property, which can be with respect to a desired operating point or a prescribed trajectory, is often linked with optimality, which requires minimizing a certain cost along the trajectories of a stable system. In formal verification (model checking), simple systems, such as finite-state transition graphs that model computer programs or digital circuits, are checked against rich specifications given as formulas of temporal logics. The formal synthesis problem, in which the goal is to synthesize or control a finite system from a temporal logic specification, has recently received increased interest. In this article, we review some recent results on the connection between optimal control and formal synthesis. Specifically, we focus on the following problem: Given a cost and a correctness temporal logic specification for a dynamical system, generate an optimal control strategy that satisfies the specification. We first provide a short overview of automata-based methods, in which the dynamics of the system are mapped to a finite abstraction that is then controlled using an automaton corresponding to the specification. We then provide a detailed overview of a class of methods that rely on mapping the specification and the dynamics to constraints of an optimization problem. We discuss advantages and limitations of these two types of approaches and suggest directions for future research.
暂无评论