Machine Learning

Autonomous robot navigation in partially observable environments is a complex task because the state of the environment can not be completely determined only by the current sensory readings of a robot. This work uses the recently introduced paradigm for training recurrent neural networks (RNNs), called reservoir computing (RC), to model multiple navigation attractors in partially observable environments. In RC, the RNN with randomly generated fixed weights, called reservoir, projects the input into a high-dimensional dynamic space. Only the readout output layer is trained using standard linear regression techniques, and in this work, is used to approximate the state-action value function. By using a policy iteration framework, where an alternating sequence of policy improvement (samples generation from environment interaction) and policy evaluation (network training) steps are performed, the system is able to shape navigation attractors so that, after convergence, the robot follows the correct trajectory towards the goal. The experiments are accomplished using an e-puck robot extended with 8 distance sensors in a rectangular environment with an obstacle between the robot and the target region. The task is to reach the goal through the correct side of the environment, which is indicated by a temporary stimulus previously observed at the beginning of the episode. We show that the reservoir-based system (with short-term memory) can model these navigation attractors, whereas a feedforward network without memory fails to do so.

Reservoir Computing network as a function approximator for reinforcement learning tasks with partially observable environments. The reservoir is a dynamical system of recurrent nodes. Solid lines represent connections which are fixed. Dashed lines are the connections to be trained

Motor primitives or basic behaviors: left, forward and right.

A sequence of robot trajectories as learning evolves, using the ESN. Each plot shows robot trajectories in the environment for several episodes during the learning process. In the beginning, exploration is high and several locations are visited by the robot. As the simulation develops, two navigation attractors are formed to the left and to the right so that the agent receives maximal reward.

This work proposes a hierarchical biologically-inspired architecture for learning sensor-based spatial representations of a robot environment in an unsupervised way. The first layer is comprised of a fixed randomly generated recurrent neural network, the reservoir, which projects the input into a high-dimensional, dynamic space. The second layer learns instantaneous slowly-varying signals from the reservoir states using Slow Feature Analysis (SFA), whereas the third layer learns a sparse coding on the SFA layer using Independent Component Analysis (ICA). While the SFA layer generates non-localized activations in space, the ICA layer presents high place selectivity, forming a localized spatial activation, characteristic of place cells found in the hippocampus area of the rodent’s brain. We show that, using a limited number of noisy short-range distance sensors as input, the proposed system learns a spatial representation of the environment which can be used to predict the actual location of simulated and real robots, without the use of odometry. The results confirm that the reservoir layer is essential for learning spatial representations from low-dimensional input such as distance sensors. The main reason is that the reservoir state reflects the recent history of the input stream. Thus, this fading memory is essential for detecting locations, mainly when locations are ambiguous and characterized by similar sensor readings.

Video for data generation:

Publications

1. Eric Antonelo and Benjamin Schrauwen Learning slow features with reservoir computing for biologically-inspired robot localization NEURAL NETWORKS, pp. 178-190 (2011)   
2. Eric Antonelo and Benjamin Schrauwen Towards autonomous self-localization of small mobile robots using reservoir computing and slow feature analysis IEEE International conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Conference digest, Vol. 2, pp. (2009)   
3. Eric Antonelo and Benjamin Schrauwen Unsupervised learning in reservoir computing : modeling hippocampal place cells for small mobile robots LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE, Vol. 5768, pp. 747-756 (2009)