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Complex multi-robot missions often require heterogeneous teams to jointly optimize task allocation, scheduling, and path planning to improve team performance under strict constraints. We formalize these complexities into a new class of…
Robust motion planning is a well-studied problem in the robotics literature, yet current algorithms struggle to operate scalably and safely in the presence of other moving agents, such as humans. This paper introduces a novel framework for…
Soft robots offer more flexibility, compliance, and adaptability than traditional rigid robots. They are also typically lighter and cheaper to manufacture. However, their use in real-world applications is limited due to modeling challenges…
Collaborative robots (cobots) are machines designed to work safely alongside people in human-centric environments. Providing cobots with the ability to quickly infer the inertial parameters of manipulated objects will improve their…
Real-world robots are becoming increasingly complex and commonly act in poorly understood environments where it is extremely challenging to model or learn their true dynamics. Therefore, it might be desirable to take a task-specific…
RL is increasingly being used to control robotic systems that interact closely with humans. This interaction raises the problem of safe RL: how to ensure that a RL-controlled robotic system never, for instance, injures a human. This problem…
In imitation and reinforcement learning, the cost of human supervision limits the amount of data that robots can be trained on. An aspirational goal is to construct self-improving robots: robots that can learn and improve on their own, from…
Autonomous Experimentation Platforms (AEPs) are advanced manufacturing platforms that, under intelligent control, can sequentially search the material design space (MDS) and identify parameters with the desired properties. At the heart of…
With the rapid growth of computing powers and recent advances in deep learning, we have witnessed impressive demonstrations of novel robot capabilities in research settings. Nonetheless, these learning systems exhibit brittle generalization…
Bayesian Optimization (BO) is a powerful tool for optimizing complex non-linear systems. However, its performance degrades in high-dimensional problems with tightly coupled parameters and highly asymmetric objective landscapes, where…
This paper addresses motion replanning in human-robot collaborative scenarios, emphasizing reactivity and safety-compliant efficiency. While existing human-aware motion planners are effective in structured environments, they often struggle…
Path planning algorithms, such as the search-based A*, are a critical component of autonomous mobile robotics, enabling robots to navigate from a starting point to a destination efficiently and safely. We investigated the resilience of the…
This paper presents an Improved Bayesian Optimization (IBO) algorithm to solve complex high-dimensional epidemic models' optimal control solution. Evaluating the total objective function value for disease control models with hundreds of…
Online tuning of real-world plants is a complex optimisation problem that continues to require manual intervention by experienced human operators. Autonomous tuning is a rapidly expanding field of research, where learning-based methods,…
While robot learning has demonstrated promising results for enabling robots to automatically acquire new skills, a critical challenge in deploying learning-based systems is scale: acquiring enough data for the robot to effectively…
Recent advances in robot learning have enabled robots to become increasingly better at mastering a predefined set of tasks. On the other hand, as humans, we have the ability to learn a growing set of tasks over our lifetime. Continual robot…
As robots are being increasingly used in close proximity to humans and objects, it is imperative that robots operate safely and efficiently under real-world conditions. Yet, the environment is seldom known perfectly. Noisy sensors and…
Learning-based control algorithms require data collection with abundant supervision for training. Safe exploration algorithms ensure the safety of this data collection process even when only partial knowledge is available. We present a new…
Bayesian optimisation (BO) is a well-known efficient algorithm for finding the global optimum of expensive, black-box functions. The current practical BO algorithms have regret bounds ranging from $\mathcal{O}(\frac{logN}{\sqrt{N}})$ to…
Risk assessment of a robot in controlled environments, such as laboratories and proving grounds, is a common means to assess, certify, validate, verify, and characterize the robots' safety performance before, during, and even after their…