Neural Inverse Source Problem

Youngsun Wi, Jayjun Lee, Miquel Oller, Nima Fazeli

Keywords: Inverse source problem, Physics informed neural network

Abstract: Reconstructing unknown external source functions is an important perception capability for a large range of robotics domains including manipulation, aerial, and underwater robotics. In this work, we propose a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) based approach for solving the inverse source problems in robotics, jointly identifying unknown source functions and the complete state of a system given partial and noisy observations. Our approach demonstrates several advantages over prior works (Finite Element Methods (FEM) and data-driven approaches): it offers flexibility in integrating diverse constraints and boundary conditions; eliminates the need for complex discretizations (e.g., meshing); easily accommodates gradients from real measurements; and does not limit performance based on the diversity and quality of training data. We validate our method across three simulation and real-world scenarios involving up to 4th order partial differential equations (PDEs), constraints such as Signorini and Dirichlet, and various regression losses including Chamfer distance and L2 norm.

Student Paper: yes

Submission Number: 423