The PHD: A Planar, Harmonic Drive Robot for Joint Torque Control

This thesis details the development of a model of a seven degree of freedom manipulator for position control. Then, it goes on to discuss the design and construction of a the PHD, a robot built to serve two purposes: first, to perform research on joint torque control schemes, and second, to determine the important dynamic characteristics of the Harmonic Drive. The PHD, is a planar, three degree of freedom arm with torque sensors integral to each joint. Preliminary testing has shown that a simple linear spring model of the Harmonic Drive's flexibility is suitable in many situations.

Maximum Entropy Discrimination

We present a general framework for discriminative estimation based on the maximum entropy principle and its extensions. All calculations involve distributions over structures and/or parameters rather than specific settings and reduce to relative entropy projections. This holds even when the data is not separable within the chosen parametric class, in the context of anomaly detection rather than classification, or when the labels in the training set are uncertain or incomplete. Support vector machines are naturally subsumed under this class and we provide several extensions. We are also able to estimate exactly and efficiently discriminative distributions over tree structures of class-conditional models within this framework. Preliminary experimental results are indicative of the potential in these techniques.