Sigma-Delta Networks for Robot Arm Control

Abstract

Our autonomous robot, Bight, can be a reliable teammate that is capable of assisting in performing routine maintenance tasks on a Naval vessel. In this paper, we consider the task of maintaining the electrical panel. A vital first step is putting the robot into the correct position to view all of the parts of the electrical panel. The robot can get close, but the arm of the robot will need to move to where it can see everything. Here, we propose to solve this using a sigma delta spiking network that is trained using deep Q learning. Our approach is able to successfully solve this problem at varying distances. While we show how this works on this specific problem, we believe this approach to be general enough to be applied to any similar problem.