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Fun story: We once had a robot at a very big company you've all heard of that kept getting too close to walls when moving down hallway-like areas. The controls
by jvanderbot 2y ago
Fun story: We once had a robot at a very big company you've all heard of that kept getting too close to walls when moving down hallway-like areas. The controls engineer swore he had tuned the controller to death and no further improvements could be had.
A perception engineer took one look at the controller and saw linear error terms for distance left + distance right (distance to walls), changed it to distance left^2 + distance right^2, and the whole thing magically worked beautifully. Exercise for the reader: What position in the hallway minimizes sum of distances squared, vs what position(s) in the hallway minimize sum of distances without square.
This is essentially the same problem you pose.
- jncfhnb 2y agoKind of funny but wouldn’t you want to just maximize(distance_left, distance_right) if you wanted the center? Edit: no, derp, just walked into the same problem lol. Maximize the min should work though
- jvanderbot 2y agoThat has a unique solution, so it is infinitely better than the linear error, but is not a nice differentiable signal suitable for controls, I'd bet. But that wasn't in the problem statement.
- CamperBob2 2y agoSeems like you'd want to minimize the distance to the midpoint, but I'm probably missing something.
- jvanderbot 2y agoFun fact: that's what sum of square does