Fish-like swimming has inspired the design of several dozens if not hundreds of bioinspired robots in the last few decades. But the control and motion planning of such robots has been challenging due to the poorly modeled fluid-structure interaction and the nonlinear underactuated dynamics of such robots. While reinforcement learning has allowed significant advances in the context of ground and aerial robots, the lack of a suitable simulation environment with appropriate computational speed and accuracy have prevented similar progress for fish-like robots. We address this two-fold problem by developing a simulation platform that approximates the motion of our fish-like robot with computational efficiency. Then the motion control and path tracking by the robot is performed using PID control where the (variable) gains are learned using back propagation through time and training on a curriculum. The policy learned in the simulation is then applied on the physical platform, demonstrating an excellent match.
Reinforcement learning (RL) research has demonstrated success in both physical and simulated domains; however, the predominant methodology remains rooted in simulations. The predominance of simulations makes translating research to physical reality uncertain for both algorithms a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for legged robots is advancing locomotion, demonstrating its ability to adapt to new and challenging terrain. Traditionally, these RL locomotion frameworks are position-based, making the policy less adaptable to terrain types and requiring state estima…
Autonomous robotic navigation in nonstationary time-varying fluid flows remains a fundamental challenge due to partial observability and the unpredictability of realistic environments. While classical optimal control frameworks employed in robotics require unrealistic a-priori gl…
Multi-drone payload transportation has emerged as a promising research paradigm with potential applications in construction, logistics, and disaster response. However, the complex coupled dynamics among drones, cables, and payloads pose significant challenges, and existing approa…
Connected and automated vehicle (CAV) platooning promises gains in energy efficiency and traffic throughput and, most critically, in safety. These safety benefits hinge on string stability, which determines how disturbances propagate along a platoon. While longitudinal string sta…
Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) holds great potential for robot swarms, but the black-box nature of neural policies complicates strategic analysis, limiting multi-robot applications. Furthermore, complex swarm behaviors can surprisingly emerge from simple rewards withou…