[mlpack] Robotic Arm project for GSoC'18

Fri Mar 2 04:47:49 EST 2018

Hi Marcus,

I have tested a couple of methods of interprocess communication over the
week.
Using TCP sockets are very fast indeed and libraries like ZeroMQ help
implement them with nearly negligible effort.
Another method that I did try was to use a producer-consumer queue. The
producer and the consumer run on different threads. The producer adds
consumables to a processing queue. The consumer then processes the items on
this queue in a FIFO manner. This method is a little bit faster than using
scokets as there is no overhead involved for the protocol.
As per your suggestion, I went through a few popular methods of
interprocess communication (namely, named pipes, sockets and producer
consumer queues), link to the repo containing the same is here:
https://github.com/Sayan98/ipc . Using flask (ie. HTTP) would be a bad fit.
My apologies for my oversight.

For the simulation, would Gazebo be a good choice? Its merits include inbuilt
support for communication over sockets(using ProtoBuf), support for adanced
3d graphics and physics engines.

Sincerely,
Sayan
 Goswami

On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 3:50 AM, Marcus Edel <marcus.edel at fu-berlin.de>
wrote:

> Hello Sayan,
>
> Thanks for the feedback, I like the general idea, not sure about flask, as
> I
> wrote https://github.com/zoq/gym_tcp_api I was also testing out HTTP but
> it was
> way slower as using a socket, not sure flask is faster; I guess we will
> have to
> test it out. Http is probably easier to use since you could use a simple
> server
> as a backend, on the other side our usage isn't exactly what HTTP is
> commonly
> used for. But this is easy to test out, we could just come up with a simple
> example and run some tests. Let me know what you think.
>
> Thanks,
> Marcus
>
> On 26. Feb 2018, at 03:53, Sayan Goswami <goswami.sayan47 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hi Marcus,
>
> Using Python (with OpenGL) for writing the simulator seems like a better
> option to me primarily because it will allow for more flexibility. Graphics
> libraries like pygame should provide a good a starting point for the
> simulation. As far as communication between the simulation and the agent
> go, I was thinking of having an HTTP server to serialize data and transfer
> it between the learning agent and the server(using flask). The agent can
> poll the server at time intervals for new content and process them.
> Having used the libraries above for numerous personal projects, I am quite
> comfortable with them.
> Faster communication could be made possible using persistent sockets
> instead of polling from an HTTP endpoint.
> Purpose built software like ROS seems to be a tangible alternative too,
> but, as per your suggestion in the other thread about this project, that
> most of the available compute should be utilised for the learning
> algorithm, using a pure Python implementation should not only make it
> performant but also easily maintainable and installable.
>
> I would love to hear your suggestions on the ideas suggested above. Thank
> you for your time.
>
> Best,
> Sayan
>
>
> Sayan Goswami
> Undergraduate Student (UG-II)
> Dept. of Electronics & Telecomm. Engineering
> Jadavpur University
>
> On Sun, Feb 25, 2018 at 7:09 PM, Marcus Edel <marcus.edel at fu-berlin.de>
> wrote:
>
>> Hello Sayan,
>>
>> welcome and thanks for getting in touch.
>>
>> My research interests lie in the field of Deep Learning (specifically Deep
>> Reinforcement Learning). I have been exploring deep neural network
>> architecture
>> for the past year and a half. I am familiar with deep learning. I have a
>> completed numerous massively open online courses on the field with close
>> to 100%
>> grade in each. I am presently a community Course Mentor at
>> deeplearning.ai's
>> course on Convolutional Neural Networks. I am also quite comfortable using
>> processing (Having used it to explore generative art).
>>
>>
>> Using processing is one idea, there are various possibilities each with
>> its own
>> strengths. So if you say you like to implement the simulator in plain
>> python
>> using OpenGL this is also an option we should take a closer look into.
>>
>> I have already compiled the codebase from source and have run the tests.
>> However, as is mentioned in the proposal documentation, I am unable to
>> find
>> issues pertaining to this specific project. It would be great if a mentor
>> could
>> guide me in the right direction.
>>
>>
>> We are trying to publish more issues over the next days that are project
>> related.
>>
>> I hope anything I said was helpful, let me know if I should clarify
>> anything.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Marcus
>>
>> On 25. Feb 2018, at 05:57, Sayan Goswami <goswami.sayan47 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am Sayan Goswami, a sophomore year undergraduate student at Jadavpur
>> University, India. I would like to work on the "Robotic Arm" project as a
>> part of GSoC '18.
>>
>> My research interests lie in the field of Deep Learning (specifically
>> Deep Reinforcement Learning). I have been exploring deep neural network
>> architecture for the past year and a half. I am familiar with deep
>> learning. I have a completed numerous massively open online courses on the
>> field with close to 100% grade in each. I am presently a community Course
>> Mentor at deeplearning.ai's course on Convolutional Neural Networks. I
>> am also quite comfortable using processing (Having used it to explore
>> generative art).
>>
>> I am presently going through the mlpack methods API and getting familiar
>> with the codebase.
>>
>> I have already compiled the codebase from source and have run the tests.
>> However, as is mentioned in the proposal documentation, I am unable to find
>> issues pertaining to this specific project. It would be great if a mentor
>> could guide me in the right direction.
>>
>> I have attached my resume for your kind perusal.
>>
>> Looking forward to a hearing back soon. Thank you for your time.
>>
>> Resume: https://goo.gl/6jLhru
>> <https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwAJkZuRJT6tWmN3NHdSM0t6TGs>
>>
>>
>> Sincerely,
>> Sayan Goswami
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> mlpack at lists.mlpack.org
>> http://knife.lugatgt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlpack
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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