about
Learning to Control Self-Assembling Morphologies (arxiv.org)
1 point by ArtWomb on Oct 10, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Simple motorized limbs learn to snap together magnetically into bigger bodies and move as one, with a control system that mirrors the body's shape. In tests, they adapted better to new surroundings and altered body structures than fixed, single-piece agents.

Abstract · Learning to Control Self-Assembling Morphologies: A Study of Generalization via Modularity

Contemporary sensorimotor learning approaches typically start with an existing complex agent (e.g., a robotic arm), which they learn to control. In contrast, this paper investigates a modular co-evolution strategy: a collection of primitive agents learns to dynamically self-assemble into composite bodies while also learning to coordinate their behavior to control these bodies. Each primitive agent consists of a limb with a motor attached at one end. Limbs may choose to link up to form collectives. When a limb initiates a link-up action, and there is another limb nearby, the latter is magnetically connected to the 'parent' limb's motor. This forms a new single agent, which may further link with other agents. In this way, complex morphologies can emerge, controlled by a policy whose architecture is in explicit correspondence with the morphology. We evaluate the performance of these dynamic and modular agents in simulated environments. We demonstrate better generalization to test-time changes both in the environment, as well as in the structure of the agent, compared to static and monolithic baselines. Project video and code are available at https://pathak22.github.io/modular-assemblies/

Deepak Pathak, Chris Lu, Trevor Darrell, Phillip Isola, Alexei A. Efros
arXiv:1902.05546 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.NE, cs.RO, stat.ML · submitted Feb 14, 2019 · updated Nov 21, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · NeurIPS 2019 (Spotlight). Videos at https://pathak22.github.io/modular-assemblies/

add comment on HN