Matching Items (2)
Filtering by

Clear all filters

158010-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Robotic lower limb prostheses provide new opportunities to help transfemoral amputees regain mobility. However, their application is impeded by that the impedance control parameters need to be tuned and optimized manually by prosthetists for each individual user in different task environments. Reinforcement learning (RL) is capable of automatically learning from

Robotic lower limb prostheses provide new opportunities to help transfemoral amputees regain mobility. However, their application is impeded by that the impedance control parameters need to be tuned and optimized manually by prosthetists for each individual user in different task environments. Reinforcement learning (RL) is capable of automatically learning from interacting with the environment. It becomes a natural candidate to replace human prosthetists to customize the control parameters. However, neither traditional RL approaches nor the popular deep RL approaches are readily suitable for learning with limited number of samples and samples with large variations. This dissertation aims to explore new RL based adaptive solutions that are data-efficient for controlling robotic prostheses.

This dissertation begins by proposing a new flexible policy iteration (FPI) framework. To improve sample efficiency, FPI can utilize either on-policy or off-policy learning strategy, can learn from either online or offline data, and can even adopt exiting knowledge of an external critic. Approximate convergence to Bellman optimal solutions are guaranteed under mild conditions. Simulation studies validated that FPI was data efficient compared to several established RL methods. Furthermore, a simplified version of FPI was implemented to learn from offline data, and then the learned policy was successfully tested for tuning the control parameters online on a human subject.

Next, the dissertation discusses RL control with information transfer (RL-IT), or knowledge-guided RL (KG-RL), which is motivated to benefit from transferring knowledge acquired from one subject to another. To explore its feasibility, knowledge was extracted from data measurements of able-bodied (AB) subjects, and transferred to guide Q-learning control for an amputee in OpenSim simulations. This result again demonstrated that data and time efficiency were improved using previous knowledge.

While the present study is new and promising, there are still many open questions to be addressed in future research. To account for human adaption, the learning control objective function may be designed to incorporate human-prosthesis performance feedback such as symmetry, user comfort level and satisfaction, and user energy consumption. To make the RL based control parameter tuning practical in real life, it should be further developed and tested in different use environments, such as from level ground walking to stair ascending or descending, and from walking to running.
ContributorsGao, Xiang (Author) / Si, Jennie (Thesis advisor) / Huang, He Helen (Committee member) / Santello, Marco (Committee member) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
161703-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
With the formation of next generation wireless communication, a growing number of new applications like internet of things, autonomous car, and drone is crowding the unlicensed spectrum. Licensed network such as LTE also comes to the unlicensed spectrum for better providing high-capacity contents with low cost. However, LTE was not

With the formation of next generation wireless communication, a growing number of new applications like internet of things, autonomous car, and drone is crowding the unlicensed spectrum. Licensed network such as LTE also comes to the unlicensed spectrum for better providing high-capacity contents with low cost. However, LTE was not designed for sharing spectrum with others. A cooperation center for these networks is costly because they possess heterogeneous properties and everyone can enter and leave the spectrum unrestrictedly, so the design will be challenging. Since it is infeasible to incorporate potentially infinite scenarios with one unified design, an alternative solution is to let each network learn its own coexistence policy. Previous solutions only work on fixed scenarios. In this work we present a reinforcement learning algorithm to cope with the coexistence between Wi-Fi and LTE-LAA agents in 5 GHz unlicensed spectrum. The coexistence problem was modeled as a Dec-POMDP and Bayesian approach was adopted for policy learning with nonparametric prior to accommodate the uncertainty of policy for different agents. A fairness measure was introduced in the reward function to encourage fair sharing between agents. We turned the reinforcement learning into an optimization problem by transforming the value function as likelihood and variational inference for posterior approximation. Simulation results demonstrate that this algorithm can reach high value with compact policy representations, and stay computationally efficient when applying to agent set.
ContributorsSHIH, PO-KAN (Author) / Moraffah, Bahman (Thesis advisor) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Thesis advisor) / Dasarathy, Gautam (Committee member) / Shih, YiChang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021