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Biomedical subjects

Juyang Weng

Publications and source records attributed to Juyang Weng.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Auditory learning: a developmental method.

Motivated by the human autonomous development process from infancy to adulthood, we have built a robot that develops its cognitive and behavioral skills through real-time interactions with the environment. We call such a robot a developmental robot. In this paper, we present the theory and the architecture to implement a developmental robot and discuss the related techniques that address an array of challenging technical issues. As an application, experimental results on a real robot, self-organizing, autonomous, incremental learner (SAIL), are presented with emphasis on its audition perception and audition-related action generation. In particular, the SAIL robot conducts the auditory learning from unsegmented and unlabeled speech streams without any prior knowledge about the auditory signals, such as the designated language or the phoneme models. Neither available before learning starts are the actions that the robot is expected to perform. SAIL learns the auditory commands and the desired actions from physical contacts with the environment including the trainers.

Algorithms↗

Vision-guided navigation using SHOSLIF.

This paper presents an unconventional approach to vision-guided autonomous navigation. The system recalls information about scenes and navigational experience using content-based retrieval from a visual database. To achieve a high applicability to various road types, we do not impose a priori scene features, such as road edges, that the system must use, but rather, the system automatically derives features from images during supervised learning. To accomplish this, the system uses principle component analysis and linear discriminant analysis to automatically derive the most expressive features (MEF) for scene reconstruction or the most discriminating features (MDF) for scene classification. These features best describe or classify the population of the scenes and approximate complex decision regions using piecewise linear boundaries up to a desired accuracy. A new self-organizing scheme called recursive partition tree (RPT) is used for automatic construction of a vision-and-control database, which quickly prunes the data set in the content-based search and results in a low time complexity of O(log(n)) for retrieval from a database of size n. The system combines principle component and linear discriminant analysis networks with a decision tree network. It has been tested on a mobile robot, Rome, in an unknown indoor environment to learn scenes and the associated navigation experience. In the performing phase, the mobile robot navigates autonomously in similar environments, while allowing the presence of scene perturbations such as the presence of passersby.

Journal Article↗

Autonomous mental development in high dimensional context and action spaces.

Autonomous Mental Development (AMD) of robots opened a new paradigm for developing machine intelligence, using neural network type of techniques and it fundamentally changed the way an intelligent machine is developed from manual to autonomous. The work presented here is a part of SAIL (Self-Organizing Autonomous Incremental Learner) project which deals with autonomous development of humanoid robot with vision, audition, manipulation and locomotion. The major issue addressed here is the challenge of high dimensional action space (5-10) in addition to the high dimensional context space (hundreds to thousands and beyond), typically required by an AMD machine. This is the first work that studies a high dimensional (numeric) action space in conjunction with a high dimensional perception (context state) space, under the AMD mode. Two new learning algorithms, Direct Update on Direction Cosines (DUDC) and High-Dimensional Conjugate Gradient Search (HCGS), are developed, implemented and tested. The convergence properties of both the algorithms and their targeted applications are discussed. Autonomous learning of speech production under reinforcement learning is studied as an example.

Learning↗