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Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning algorithms have shown great potential and success for solving many challenging real-world problems, including Go game and robotic applications. Usually, these algorithms need a carefully…

Resource-constrained robotic platforms are particularly useful for tasks that require low-cost hardware alternatives due to the risk of losing the robot, like in search-and-rescue applications, or the need for a large number of devices,…

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms frequently require prohibitive interaction experience to ensure the quality of learned policies. The limitation is partly because the agent cannot learn much from the many low-quality trials in…

This paper addresses non-prehensile rearrangement planning problems where a robot is tasked to rearrange objects among obstacles on a planar surface. We present an efficient planning algorithm that is designed to impose few assumptions on…

The rapid deployment of robotics technologies requires dedicated optimization algorithms to manage large fleets of autonomous agents. This paper supports robotic parts-to-picker operations in warehousing by optimizing order-workstation…

While quadruped robots usually have good stability and load capacity, bipedal robots offer a higher level of flexibility / adaptability to different tasks and environments. A multi-modal legged robot can take the best of both worlds. In…

While imitation learning provides us with an efficient toolkit to train robots, learning skills that are robust to environment variations remains a significant challenge. Current approaches address this challenge by relying either on large…

This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…

Humanoid robots promise transformative capabilities for industrial and service applications. While recent advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) yield impressive results in locomotion, manipulation, and navigation, the proposed methods…

This paper describes a data-driven framework for approximate global optimization in which precomputed solutions to a sample of problems are retrieved and adapted during online use to solve novel problems. This approach has promise for…

Robust and efficient learning remains a challenging problem in robotics, in particular with complex visual inputs. Inspired by human attention mechanism, with which we quickly process complex visual scenes and react to changes in the…

Robot accidents are inevitable. Although rare, they have been happening since assembly-line robots were first introduced in the 1960s. But a new generation of social robots are now becoming commonplace. Often with sophisticated embedded…

Robot learning is at an inflection point, driven by rapid advancements in machine learning and the growing availability of large-scale robotics data. This shift from classical, model-based methods to data-driven, learning-based paradigms is…

Efficient navigation in dynamic environments is crucial for autonomous robots interacting with moving agents and static obstacles. We present a novel deep reinforcement learning approach that improves robot navigation and interaction with…

For robots to perform assistive tasks in unstructured home environments, they must learn and reason on the semantic knowledge of the environments. Despite a resurgence in the development of semantic reasoning architectures, these methods…

In traditional topology optimization, the computing time required to iteratively update the material distribution within a design domain strongly depends on the complexity or size of the problem, limiting its application in real engineering…

Real-world robots must operate under evolving dynamics caused by changing operating conditions, external disturbances, and unmodeled effects. These may appear as gradual drifts, transient fluctuations, or abrupt shifts, demanding real-time…

We consider the problem of a robot learning the mechanical properties of objects through physical interaction with the object, and introduce a practical, data-efficient approach for identifying the motion models of these objects. The…

Shared-autonomy imitation learning lets a human correct a robot in real time, mitigating covariate-shift errors. Yet existing approaches ignore two critical factors: (i) the operator's cognitive load and (ii) the risk created by delayed or…

Error feedback is known to improve performance by correcting control signals in response to perturbations. Here we show how adding simple error feedback can also accelerate and robustify autonomous learning in a tendon-driven robot. We…