Related papers: Learning a Unified Control Policy for Safe Falling

Reinforcement learning, mathematically described by Markov Decision Problems, may be approached either through dynamic programming or policy search. Actor-critic algorithms combine the merits of both approaches by alternating between steps…

We study a human-robot collaborative transportation task in presence of obstacles. The task for each agent is to carry a rigid object to a common target position, while safely avoiding obstacles and satisfying the compliance and actuation…

We propose a novel and efficient lifting approach for the optimal control of rigid-body systems with contacts to improve the convergence properties of Newton-type methods. To relax the high nonlinearity, we consider the state, acceleration,…

Off-policy learning methods seek to derive an optimal policy directly from a fixed dataset of prior interactions. This objective presents significant challenges, primarily due to the inherent distributional shift and value function…

When humans interact with learning-based control systems, a common goal is to minimize a cost function known only to the human. For instance, an exoskeleton may adapt its assistance in an effort to minimize the human's metabolic…

Most animal and human locomotion behaviors for solving complex tasks involve dynamic motions and rich contact interaction. In fact, complex maneuvers need to consider dynamic movement and contact events at the same time. We present a…

Prior work on automatic control synthesis for cyber-physical systems under logical constraints has primarily focused on environmental disturbances or modeling uncertainties, however, the impact of deliberate and malicious attacks has been…

The deployment of robots in uncontrolled environments requires them to operate robustly under previously unseen scenarios, like irregular terrain and wind conditions. Unfortunately, while rigorous safety frameworks from robust optimal…

Humanoid robots are well suited for human habitats due to their morphological similarity, but developing controllers for them is a challenging task that involves multiple sub-problems, such as control, planning and perception. In this…

The classical setting of optimal control theory assumes full knowledge of the process dynamics and the costs associated with every control strategy. The problem becomes much harder if the controller only knows a finite set of possible…

Humanoid robots dynamically navigate an environment by interacting with it via contact wrenches exerted at intermittent contact poses. Therefore, it is important to consider dynamics when planning a contact sequence. Traditional contact…

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) policies, although optimal in terms of task rewards, may not align with the personal preferences of human users. To ensure this alignment, a naive solution would be to retrain the agent using a reward…

This paper introduces a model-based approach for training feedback controllers for an autonomous agent operating in a highly nonlinear (albeit deterministic) environment. We desire the trained policy to ensure that the agent satisfies…

Many applications require solving non-linear control problems that are classically not well behaved. This paper develops a simple and efficient chattering algorithm that learns near optimal decision policies through an open-loop feedback…

We enable reinforcement learning agents to learn successful behavior policies by utilizing relevant pre-existing teacher policies. The teacher policies are introduced as objectives, in addition to the task objective, in a multi-objective…

Recently, learning-based controllers have been shown to push mobile robotic systems to their limits and provide the robustness needed for many real-world applications. However, only classical optimization-based control frameworks offer the…

This paper presents a novel strategy for a multi-agent pursuit-evasion game involving multiple faster pursuers with heterogenous speeds and a single slower evader. We define a geometric region, the evader's safe-reachable set, as the…

Obstacle avoidance is a fundamental vision-based task essential for enabling quadrotors to perform advanced applications. When planning the trajectory, existing approaches both on optimization and learning typically regard quadrotor as a…

In contact-rich tasks, the hybrid, multi-modal nature of contact dynamics poses great challenges in model representation, planning, and control. Recent efforts have attempted to address these challenges via data-driven methods, learning…

Humanoid robotics has strong potential to transform daily service and caregiving applications. Although recent advances in general motion tracking within physics engines (GMT) have enabled virtual characters and humanoid robots to reproduce…