We introduce Nosey (Nasalance Open Source Estimation sYstem), a low-cost, customizable, 3D-printed system for recording acoustic nasalance data that we have made available as open-source hardware (http://github.com/phoneticslab/nosey). We first outline the motivations and design principles behind our hardware nasalance system, and then present a comparison between Nosey and a commercial nasalance device. Nosey shows consistently higher nasalance scores than the commercial device, but the magnitude of contrast between phonological environments is comparable between systems. We also review ways of customizing the hardware to facilitate testing, such as comparison of microphones and different construction materials. We conclude that Nosey is a flexible and cost-effective alternative to commercial nasometry devices and propose some methodological considerations for its use in data collection.

Model-based RL is a promising approach for real-world robotics due to its improved sample efficiency and generalization capabilities compared to model-free RL. However, effective model-based RL solutions for vision-based real-world applications require bridging the sim-to-real gap for any world model learnt. Due to its significant computational cost, standard domain randomisation does not provide an effective solution to this problem. This paper proposes TWIST (Teacher-Student World Model Distillation for Sim-to-Real Transfer) to achieve efficient sim-to-real transfer of vision-based model-based RL using distillation. Specifically, TWIST leverages state observations as readily accessible, privileged information commonly garnered from a simulator to significantly accelerate sim-to-real transfer. Specifically, a teacher world model is trained efficiently on state information. At the same time, a matching dataset is collected of domain-randomised image observations. The teacher world model then supervises a student world model that takes the domain-randomised image observations as input. By distilling the learned latent dynamics model from the teacher to the student model, TWIST achieves efficient and effective sim-to-real transfer for vision-based model-based RL tasks. Experiments in simulated and real robotics tasks demonstrate that our approach outperforms naive domain randomisation and model-free methods in terms of sample efficiency and task performance of sim-to-real transfer.

Motion planning framed as optimisation in structured latent spaces has recently emerged as competitive with traditional methods in terms of planning success while significantly outperforming them in terms of computational speed. However, the real-world applicability of recent work in this domain remains limited by the need to express obstacle information directly in state-space, involving simple geometric primitives. In this work we address this challenge by leveraging learned scene embeddings together with a generative model of the robot manipulator to drive the optimisation process. In addition, we introduce an approach for efficient collision checking which directly regularises the optimisation undertaken for planning. Using simulated as well as real-world experiments, we demonstrate that our approach, AMP-LS, is able to successfully plan in novel, complex scenes while outperforming traditional planning baselines in terms of computation speed by an order of magnitude. We show that the resulting system is fast enough to enable closed-loop planning in real-world dynamic scenes.

We compare two representations used to define the morphology of legs for a hexapod robot, which are subsequently 3D printed. A leg morphology occupies a set of voxels in a voxel grid. One method, a direct representation, uses a collection of Bezier splines. The second, an indirect method, utilises CPPN-NEAT. In our first experiment, we investigate two strategies to post-process the CPPN output and ensure leg length constraints are met. The first uses an adaptive threshold on the output neuron, the second, previously reported in the literature, scales the largest generated artefact to our desired length. In our second experiment, we build on our past work that evolves the tibia of a hexapod to provide environment-specific performance benefits. We compare the performance of our direct and indirect legs across three distinct environments, represented in a high-fidelity simulator. Results are significant and support our hypothesis that the indirect representation allows for further exploration of the design space leading to improved fitness.

We quantify the accuracy of various simulators compared to a real world robotic reaching and interaction task. Simulators are used in robotics to design solutions for real world hardware without the need for physical access. The `reality gap' prevents solutions developed or learnt in simulation from performing well, or at all, when transferred to real-world hardware. Making use of a Kinova robotic manipulator and a motion capture system, we record a ground truth enabling comparisons with various simulators, and present quantitative data for various manipulation-oriented robotic tasks. We show the relative strengths and weaknesses of numerous contemporary simulators, highlighting areas of significant discrepancy, and assisting researchers in the field in their selection of appropriate simulators for their use cases.

This research considers the task of evolving the physical structure of a robot to enhance its performance in various environments, which is a significant problem in the field of Evolutionary Robotics. Inspired by the fields of evolutionary art and sculpture, we evolve only targeted parts of a robot, which simplifies the optimisation problem compared to traditional approaches that must simultaneously evolve both (actuated) body and brain. Exploration fidelity is emphasised in areas of the robot most likely to benefit from shape optimisation, whilst exploiting existing robot structure and control. Our approach uses a Genetic Algorithm to optimise collections of Bezier splines that together define the shape of a legged robot's tibia, and leg performance is evaluated in parallel in a high-fidelity simulator. The leg is represented in the simulator as 3D-printable file, and as such can be readily instantiated in reality. Provisional experiments in three distinct environments show the evolution of environment-specific leg structures that are both high-performing and notably different to those evolved in the other environments. This proof-of-concept represents an important step towards the environment-dependent optimisation of performance-critical components for a range of ubiquitous, standard, and already-capable robots that can carry out a wide variety of tasks.