Publication: 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Abstract: We present a new data-driven technique for pre-dicting the motion of a low-cost omnidirectional mobile robot under the influence of motor torques and friction forces. Our method utilizes a novel differentiable physics engine for analytically computing the gradient of the deviation between predicted motion trajectories and real-world trajectories. This allows to automatically learn and fine-tune the unknown friction coefficients on-the-fly, by minimizing a carefully designed loss function using gradient descent. Experiments show that the predicted trajectories are in excellent agreement with their real-world counterparts. Our proposed approach is computationally superior to existing black-box optimization methods, requiring very few real-world samples for accurate trajectory prediction compared to physics-agnostic techniques, such as neural net-works. Experiments also demonstrate that the proposed method allows the robot to quickly adapt to changes in the terrain. Our proposed approach combines the data-efficiency of classical analytical models that are derived from first principles, with the flexibility of data-driven methods, which makes it appropriate for low-cost mobile robots. Project website: https://go.rutgers.edu/mqxn2x6h
Bibtex:
@inproceedings{granados-2022-model-physics, title = {Model Identification and Control of a Low-cost Mobile Robot with Omnidirectional Wheels using Differentiable Physics}, author = {Granados, Edgar and Boularias, Abdeslam and Bekris, Kostas and Aanjaneya, Mridul}, year = {2022}, booktitle = {2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)}, pages = {1358--1364}, organization = {IEEE} }