Christian, Prathyush, and I came up with a rough plan on how to proceed with our new research and some goals/questions to address for this quarter. It can be found below:

  • Parameterized robot specification
    • What parameters are required to fully specify a robot?
    • Create a composable that can export robot in a way that can be used in our chosen simulation environment (see below)
  • Simulation
    • Research current offering of physics engines (needs to support soft-bodies)
      • Chrono
      • Bullet
      • Voxelyze (do we want to use voxels?)
    • Research machine learning libraries
      • Tensorflow
      • Torch
  • Machine Learning Research
    • Background research on reinforcement learning methods and principles
  • Controller (multiple options)
    • Come up with a PID controller for the Jack’s car
      • Might be good to start with as it is a simple controller
      • Choose form of feedback
      • A common form of finding gains for PID is the Ziegler-Nichols Method
      • Use machine learning to calculate gains for the controller that give similar or better results as the Ziegler Nichols method
    • Neural Network based controller
      • More complicated but in theory could be trained to be more robust than simple PID

This is a work in progress and will be updated in the future.

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