Related papers: Deep Kernels for Optimizing Locomotion Controllers

Autonomous wheeled-legged robots have the potential to transform logistics systems, improving operational efficiency and adaptability in urban environments. Navigating urban environments, however, poses unique challenges for robots,…

Deep Metric Learning (DML), a widely-used technique, involves learning a distance metric between pairs of samples. DML uses deep neural architectures to learn semantic embeddings of the input, where the distance between similar examples is…

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…

Traditional approaches to quadruped control frequently employ simplified, hand-derived models. This significantly reduces the capability of the robot since its effective kinematic range is curtailed. In addition, kinodynamic constraints are…

Precise trajectory tracking for legged robots can be challenging due to their high degrees of freedom, unmodeled nonlinear dynamics, or random disturbances from the environment. A commonly adopted solution to overcome these challenges is to…

Sampled environment transitions are a critical input to deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms. Current DRL benchmarks often allow for the cheap and easy generation of large amounts of samples such that perceived progress in DRL does…

In this work, we propose a robust approach to design distributed controllers for unknown-but-sparse linear and time-invariant systems. By leveraging modern techniques in distributed controller synthesis and structured linear inverse…

Sampling based methods are widely used for robotic motion planning. Traditionally, these samples are drawn from probabilistic ( or deterministic ) distributions to cover the state space uniformly. Despite being probabilistically complete,…

We provide a method to solve optimization problem when objective function is a complex stochastic simulator of an urban transportation system. To reach this goal, a Bayesian optimization framework is introduced. We show how the choice of…

Practical deployments of coordinated fleets of mobile robots in different environments have revealed the benefits of maintaining small distances between robots, especially as they move at higher speeds. However, this is counter-intuitive in…

Automated chemical synthesis, materials fabrication, and spectroscopic physical measurements often bring forth the challenge of process trajectory optimization, i.e., discovering the time dependence of temperature, electric field, or…

Robots and intelligent systems that sense or interact with the world are increasingly being used to automate a wide array of tasks. The ability of these systems to complete these tasks depends on a large range of technologies such as the…

The potential impact of autonomous robots on everyday life is evident in emerging applications such as precision agriculture, search and rescue, and infrastructure inspection. However, such applications necessitate operation in unknown and…

Diversity of environments is a key challenge that causes learned robotic controllers to fail due to the discrepancies between the training and evaluation conditions. Training from demonstrations in various conditions can mitigate---but not…

Learning locomotion skills is a challenging problem. To generate realistic and smooth locomotion, existing methods use motion capture, finite state machines or morphology-specific knowledge to guide the motion generation algorithms. Deep…

It is often necessary for drones to complete delivery, photography, and rescue in the shortest time to increase efficiency. Many autonomous drone races provide platforms to pursue algorithms to finish races as quickly as possible for the…

Abstract models of system-level behaviour have applications in design exploration, analysis, testing and verification. We describe a new algorithm for automatically extracting useful models, as automata, from execution traces of a HW/SW…

We propose a model-based reinforcement learning (RL) approach for noisy time-dependent gate optimization with improved sample complexity over model-free RL. Sample complexity is the number of controller interactions with the physical…

Collision-free motion is essential for mobile robots. Most approaches to collision-free and efficient navigation with wheeled robots require parameter tuning by experts to obtain good navigation behavior. This study investigates the…

This paper aims to identify in a practical manner unknown physical parameters, such as mechanical models of actuated robot links, which are critical in dynamical robotic tasks. Key features include the use of an off-the-shelf physics engine…