Neural Circuit Architectural Priors for Quadruped Locomotion

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bhattasali, Nikhil X., Pattabiraman, Venkatesh, Pinto, Lerrel, Lindsay, Grace W.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Bhattasali, Nikhil X.
Pattabiraman, Venkatesh
Pinto, Lerrel
Lindsay, Grace W.
author_facet Bhattasali, Nikhil X.
Pattabiraman, Venkatesh
Pinto, Lerrel
Lindsay, Grace W.
contents Learning-based approaches to quadruped locomotion commonly adopt generic policy architectures like fully connected MLPs. As such architectures contain few inductive biases, it is common in practice to incorporate priors in the form of rewards, training curricula, imitation data, or trajectory generators. In nature, animals are born with priors in the form of their nervous system's architecture, which has been shaped by evolution to confer innate ability and efficient learning. For instance, a horse can walk within hours of birth and can quickly improve with practice. Such architectural priors can also be useful in ANN architectures for AI. In this work, we explore the advantages of a biologically inspired ANN architecture for quadruped locomotion based on neural circuits in the limbs and spinal cord of mammals. Our architecture achieves good initial performance and comparable final performance to MLPs, while using less data and orders of magnitude fewer parameters. Our architecture also exhibits better generalization to task variations, even admitting deployment on a physical robot without standard sim-to-real methods. This work shows that neural circuits can provide valuable architectural priors for locomotion and encourages future work in other sensorimotor skills.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_07174
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neural Circuit Architectural Priors for Quadruped Locomotion
Bhattasali, Nikhil X.
Pattabiraman, Venkatesh
Pinto, Lerrel
Lindsay, Grace W.
Neurons and Cognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Robotics
Learning-based approaches to quadruped locomotion commonly adopt generic policy architectures like fully connected MLPs. As such architectures contain few inductive biases, it is common in practice to incorporate priors in the form of rewards, training curricula, imitation data, or trajectory generators. In nature, animals are born with priors in the form of their nervous system's architecture, which has been shaped by evolution to confer innate ability and efficient learning. For instance, a horse can walk within hours of birth and can quickly improve with practice. Such architectural priors can also be useful in ANN architectures for AI. In this work, we explore the advantages of a biologically inspired ANN architecture for quadruped locomotion based on neural circuits in the limbs and spinal cord of mammals. Our architecture achieves good initial performance and comparable final performance to MLPs, while using less data and orders of magnitude fewer parameters. Our architecture also exhibits better generalization to task variations, even admitting deployment on a physical robot without standard sim-to-real methods. This work shows that neural circuits can provide valuable architectural priors for locomotion and encourages future work in other sensorimotor skills.
title Neural Circuit Architectural Priors for Quadruped Locomotion
topic Neurons and Cognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07174