NUPIC and robotics

Engineering NuPIC
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Hello there!

I’m curious. Has there been any recent implementation of CLA in a robotic setting?
I’d like to find some examples to get me started with NUPIC.

Thanks!

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“CLA” is a very old term. You mean “HTM”. I don’t know of any examples of NuPIC powering robotics at the moment because all the sensorimotor work is still in research. There is currently no way to control robots with NuPIC, you would need to build in a reinforcement learning loop. Are you interested in ROS?

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CLA/HTM algorithms do not have any innate ability to do goal-oriented behavior. At Numenta, our main research focus is sensorimotor integration as @rhyolight mentioned. But even this is initally focused on inference and we have not spent much time considering how to integrate rewards and drive behavior towards goals.

People have tried creating motor systems by leveraging predictions. This typically involves cloning a model for each potential behavior and using the predictions of what would happen to select the best behavior. This method can work for simple situations but you are limited in how far out you can predict.

Another method is to use the internal state (active cells) of the temporal memory as input to a reinforcement learning system. I’m not sure if this can provide any benefit over standard RL approaches though.

But to do robotics right, we need to figure out the sensorimotor and behavior loops that are still not well understood. Please follow up with what you come up with!

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Thank you for your answers.

I am actually a PhD student in Clermont-Ferrand, France. My topic deals with robotic manipulation and I’ve been trying for the last two months to harness to power of reinforcement learning and I have now some more-or-less working implementations. One month ago I heard about Numenta and I really was impressed by the implications of HTM theory.

But, yeah, I’m definitely interested in ROS, though I’m much more fluent in Unity. I was actually thinking about finding some way to compare RL and HTM or try to see whether they can help each other.

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