Akinobu Hayashi, Dirk Ruiken, Christian Goerick, Tadaaki Hasegawa, "Online adaptation of uncertain models using neural network priors and partially observable planning", International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2019, 2019.

One of the key challenges in realizing a robot that is capable of completing a variety of manipulation tasks in the real world is the need to utilize sufficiently compact and rich world models. If the assumed prediction model does not match real observations, planning systems are unable to perform properly. We propose a system that corrects the models based on information collected from the robot's sensors. We encode prior experiences in a neural network to generate possible parameters of the models for a physics engine from real observations. An online POMDP solver is used to plan actions to complete the task while progressively validating the models. We perform experiments in simulations and on a real robot. The results show that this approach appropriately clarifies observed environments, can handle dynamics with discontinuities, and with increasing domain complexity achieves a better success rate than baseline methods.