Title
Analyzing Neural Jacobian Methods in Applications of Visual Servoing and Kinematic Control
Abstract
Designing adaptable control laws that can transfer between different robots is a challenge because of kinematic and dynamic differences, as well as in scenarios where external sensors are used. In this work, we empirically investigate a neural networks ability to approximate the Jacobian matrix for an application in Cartesian control schemes. Specifically, we are interested in approximating the kinematic Jacobian, which arises from kinematic equations mapping a manipulator's joint angles to the end-effector's location. We propose two different approaches to learn the kinematic Jacobian. The first method arises from visual servoing where we learn the kinematic Jacobian as an approximate linear system of equations from the k-nearest neighbors for a desired joint configuration. The second, motivated by forward models in machine learning, learns the kinematic behavior directly and calculates the Jacobian by differentiating the learned neural kinematics model. Simulation experimental results show that both methods achieve better performance than alternative data-driven methods for control, provide closer approximations to the proper kinematics Jacobian matrix, and on average produce better-conditioned Jacobian matrices. Real-world experiments were conducted on a Kinova Gen-3 lightweight robotic manipulator, which includes an uncalibrated visual servoing experiment, a practical application of our methods, as well as a 7-DOF point-topoint task highlighting that our methods are applicable on real robotic manipulators.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/ICRA48506.2021.9561373
2021 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ROBOTICS AND AUTOMATION (ICRA 2021)
DocType
Volume
Issue
Conference
2021
1
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1050-4729
0
0.34
References 
Authors
7
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Michael Przystupa100.34
Masood Dehghan2497.11
Martin Jagersand310010.96
A. Rupam Mahmood401.01