Monday, February 13, 2006

Keep Your Friends Close and Your Markov Blankets Closer

Let me begin by explaining the Markov Property and the concept of a Markov Blanket. In probability theory, a stochastic process that has the Markov Property behaves in such a way that the future state only depends on the current state. In other words, the future state is conditionally independent of the past given the current state.

Extending the notion of a one-dimensional path of states to a higher order network of states, a Markov Blanket of a node is its set of neighbouring states. In a Bayesian network, the Markov Blanket consists of the node's parents, the node's children, and the node's children's parents.


Quoting Wikipedia, "The Markov blanket of a node is interesting because it identifies all the variables that shield off the node of the rest of the network. This means that the Markov blanket of a node is the only knowledge that is needed to predict the behaviour of that node."


I've been recently exposed to the world of Dynamic Programming for my Kinematics, Dynamics, and Control class -- taught by Chris Atkeson. For the first two assignments, I've tried to implement a Dijkstra-like Dynamic Programming algorithm for the optimal control of a robotic arm. I will not get into the technical details here, but the basic idea is to cleverly maintain the Markov Blanket of a set of alive nodes instead of performing full sweeps of configuration space when doing value iteration. It ends up that you really cannot look at neighbors in a regular grid of quantized configurations; one must model the dynamics of the problem at hand. If anybody cares for a more detailed explanation, visit my KDC hw2 page.

Why am I -- a vision hacker -- talking about optimal control of a robotic arm? Why should I care about direct policy search, value iteration, dynamic programming, and planning in high-dimensional configuration spaces. Vision is my main area of research, but I am a roboticist and this is what I do. One day robots are going to need to act in order to understand the world around them (or act because they understand the world around them), and I'm not going to simply pass my vision system over to some planning/control people so they can integrate it into their robotic system.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous12:43 AM

    I don't even know what a Markov blanket is.... let alone a friend. Blah... I found a picture you should human segmentate, the web address is: www.meandyourmom.com . Nah seriously I'm waiting for the explanation, make it good so I can understand it.
    Holla at me, my pits are sweating!

    -JB and the sweet singing three little birds

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