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Title: Gathering Physical Particles with a Global Magnetic Field Using Reinforcement Learning
For biomedical applications in targeted therapy delivery and interventions, a large swarm of micro-scale particles (“agents”) has to be moved through a maze-like environment (“vascular system”) to a target region (“tumor”). Due to limited on-board capabilities, these agents cannot move autonomously; instead, they are controlled by an external global force that acts uniformly on all particles. In this work, we demonstrate how to use a time-varying magnetic field to gather particles to a desired location. We use reinforcement learning to train networks to efficiently gather particles. Methods to overcome the simulation-to-reality gap are explained, and the trained networks are deployed on a set of mazes and goal locations. The hardware experiments demonstrate fast convergence, and robustness to both sensor and actuation noise. To encourage extensions and to serve as a benchmark for the reinforcement learning community, the code is available at Github.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2130793 1553063
NSF-PAR ID:
10393220
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
10126 to 10132
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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