Dieter Büchler

PhD student

Empirical Inference

Office: N4.005
Max-Planck-Ring 4
72076 Tübingen
Germany

+49 7071 601 1916

+49 7071 601 552

robotlearning.ai

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Advisor(s):
Jan Peters

I pursue a PhD in the field of Machine Learning and Robotics with Jan Peters at the Robot Learning lab within the Empirical Inference dept by Bernhard Schölkopf. Before, I received a MSc degree in Biomedical Engineering at the Imperial College London working with Aldo Faisal. My BEng degree was rewarded to me in Information and Electrical Engineering from HAW Hamburg in conjunction with Siemens Healthcare.

My big aim is to use Machine Learning methods, especially a variety of different Reinforcement Learning approaches, to reach the performance of humans at fast changing, uncertain and high-dimensional tasks. For that purpose I develop algorithms that learn to control systems like the 7 DOF Barrett Wam arm or a self-designed muscle based robot to play table tennis.

For information and detailed construction details for the 4-DoF pneumatic artificial muscle actuated robot arm please send me an email: dbuechler[at]tue[dot]mpg[dot]de.

Learning to Control Highly Accelerated Ballistic Movements on Muscular Robots

Video highlights the capabilities of robots actuated by pneumatic muscles to 1) generate highly accelerated motions and 2) prevent damage once such fast motions are executed on the real robot. We utilize this properties to tune controllers directly on the real system using Bayesian optimization without additional safety considerations. Data of unstable controllers (the racket motion is unstable in the video) can be incorporate rather than being avoided. Please also see the paper [1]

Video accompanying our ICRA 2016 paper 'A lightweight robotic arm with pneumatic muscles for robot learning'

Video accompanying our ICRA 2016 paper 'A lightweight robotic arm with pneumatic muscles for robot learning'. This video highlights the fast hitting motions that the four degrees of freedom robot is capable of generating and safely executing. This is realized purely using muscular actuation. This property is especially useful for Machine Learning approaches that explore. With our system we hope to enable exploration in fast motion domains and hence the application of Machine Learning in tasks like smashing table tennis balls.

5 results (View BibTeX file of all listed publications)

2019

Learning to Control Highly Accelerated Ballistic Movements on Muscular Robots

Büchler, D., Calandra, R., Peters, J.

2019 (article) Submitted

Abstract

High-speed and high-acceleration movements are inherently hard to control. Applying learning to the control of such motions on anthropomorphic robot arms can improve the accuracy of the control but might damage the system. The inherent exploration of learning approaches can lead to instabilities and the robot reaching joint limits at high speeds. Having hardware that enables safe exploration of high-speed and high-acceleration movements is therefore desirable. To address this issue, we propose to use robots actuated by Pneumatic Artificial Muscles (PAMs). In this paper, we present a four degrees of freedom (DoFs) robot arm that reaches high joint angle accelerations of up to 28000 °/s^2 while avoiding dangerous joint limits thanks to the antagonistic actuation and limits on the air pressure ranges. With this robot arm, we are able to tune control parameters using Bayesian optimization directly on the hardware without additional safety considerations. The achieved tracking performance on a fast trajectory exceeds previous results on comparable PAM-driven robots. We also show that our system can be controlled well on slow trajectories with PID controllers due to careful construction considerations such as minimal bending of cables, lightweight kinematics and minimal contact between PAMs and PAMs with the links. Finally, we propose a novel technique to control the the co-contraction of antagonistic muscle pairs. Experimental results illustrate that choosing the optimal co-contraction level is vital to reach better tracking performance. Through the use of PAM-driven robots and learning, we do a small step towards the future development of robots capable of more human-like motions.

Arxiv Video [BibTex]

2019

ei Büchler, D., Calandra, R., Peters, J. Learning to Control Highly Accelerated Ballistic Movements on Muscular Robots 2019 (article) Submitted

Arxiv Video [BibTex]

2018

Control of Musculoskeletal Systems using Learned Dynamics Models

Büchler, D., Calandra, R., Schölkopf, B., Peters, J.

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Robotics and Automation Letters, 3(4):3161-3168, IEEE, 2018 (article)

Abstract

Controlling musculoskeletal systems, especially robots actuated by pneumatic artificial muscles, is a challenging task due to nonlinearities, hysteresis effects, massive actuator de- lay and unobservable dependencies such as temperature. Despite such difficulties, muscular systems offer many beneficial prop- erties to achieve human-comparable performance in uncertain and fast-changing tasks. For example, muscles are backdrivable and provide variable stiffness while offering high forces to reach high accelerations. In addition, the embodied intelligence deriving from the compliance might reduce the control demands for specific tasks. In this paper, we address the problem of how to accurately control musculoskeletal robots. To address this issue, we propose to learn probabilistic forward dynamics models using Gaussian processes and, subsequently, to employ these models for control. However, Gaussian processes dynamics models cannot be set-up for our musculoskeletal robot as for traditional motor- driven robots because of unclear state composition etc. We hence empirically study and discuss in detail how to tune these approaches to complex musculoskeletal robots and their specific challenges. Moreover, we show that our model can be used to accurately control an antagonistic pair of pneumatic artificial muscles for a trajectory tracking task while considering only one- step-ahead predictions of the forward model and incorporating model uncertainty.

RAL18final link (url) DOI [BibTex]

2018

ei Büchler, D., Calandra, R., Schölkopf, B., Peters, J. Control of Musculoskeletal Systems using Learned Dynamics Models IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Robotics and Automation Letters, 3(4):3161-3168, IEEE, 2018 (article)

RAL18final link (url) DOI [BibTex]

2016

Jointly Learning Trajectory Generation and Hitting Point Prediction in Robot Table Tennis

Huang, Y., Büchler, D., Koc, O., Schölkopf, B., Peters, J.

16th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), pages: 650-655, November 2016 (conference)

am ei

final link (url) DOI [BibTex]

2016

am ei Huang, Y., Büchler, D., Koc, O., Schölkopf, B., Peters, J. Jointly Learning Trajectory Generation and Hitting Point Prediction in Robot Table Tennis 16th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), pages: 650-655, November 2016 (conference)

final link (url) DOI [BibTex]

A Lightweight Robotic Arm with Pneumatic Muscles for Robot Learning

Büchler, D., Ott, H., Peters, J.

Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages: 4086-4092, IEEE, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 2016 (conference)

am ei

ICRA16final DOI [BibTex]

am ei Büchler, D., Ott, H., Peters, J. A Lightweight Robotic Arm with Pneumatic Muscles for Robot Learning Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages: 4086-4092, IEEE, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 2016 (conference)

ICRA16final DOI [BibTex]