Development of a PPO-Reinforcement Learned Walking Tripedal Soft-Legged Robot using SOFA

Rigid robots were extensively researched, whereas soft robotics remains an underexplored field. Utilizing soft-legged robots in performing tasks as a replacement for human beings is an important stride to take, especially under harsh and hazardous conditions over rough terrain environments. For the demand to teach any robot how to behave in different scenarios, a real-time physical and visual simulation is essential. When it comes to soft robots specifically, a simulation framework is still an arduous problem that needs to be disclosed. Using the simulation open framework architecture (SOFA) is an advantageous step. However, neither SOFA's manual nor prior public SOFA projects show its maximum capabilities the users can reach. So, we resolved this by establishing customized settings and handling the framework components appropriately. Settling on perfect, fine-tuned SOFA parameters has stimulated our motivation towards implementing the state-of-the-art (SOTA) reinforcement learning (RL) method of proximal policy optimization (PPO). The final representation is a well-defined, ready-to-deploy walking, tripedal, soft-legged robot based on PPO-RL in a SOFA environment. Robot navigation performance is a key metric to be considered for measuring the success resolution. Although in the simulated soft robots case, an 82\% success rate in reaching a single goal is a groundbreaking output, we pushed the boundaries to further steps by evaluating the progress under assigning a sequence of goals. While trailing the platform steps, outperforming discovery has been observed with an accumulative squared error deviation of 19 mm. The full code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/tarekshohdy/PPO_SOFA_Soft_Legged_Robot.git}{github.com/tarekshohdy/PPO$\textunderscore$SOFA$\textunderscore$Soft$\textunderscore$Legged$\textunderscore$ Robot.git}

Evaluation of Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithms for Weighted Max-Sat Problem: Technical Report

An experimental evaluation is conducted to asses the performance of 4 different Particle Swarm Optimization neighborhood structures in solving Max-Sat problem. The experiment has shown that none of the algorithms achieves statistically significant performance over the others under confidence level of 0.05.

Viewpoint Invariant Object Detector

Object Detection is the task of identifying the existence of an object class instance and locating it within an image. Difficulties in handling high intra-class variations constitute major obstacles to achieving high performance on standard benchmark datasets (scale, viewpoint, lighting conditions and orientation variations provide good examples). Suggested model aims at providing more robustness to detecting objects suffering severe distortion due to < 60{\deg} viewpoint changes. In addition, several model computational bottlenecks have been resolved leading to a significant increase in the model performance (speed and space) without compromising the resulting accuracy. Finally, we produced two illustrative applications showing the potential of the object detection technology being deployed in real life applications; namely content-based image search and content-based video search.