Related papers: Shaping in Practice: Training Wheels to Learn Fast…
We describe an algorithm for motion planning based on expert demonstrations of a skill. In order to teach robots to perform complex object manipulation tasks that can generalize robustly to new environments, we must (1) learn a…
Animals learn to adapt speed of their movements to their capabilities and the environment they observe. Mobile robots should also demonstrate this ability to trade-off aggressiveness and safety for efficiently accomplishing tasks. The aim…
Reward design remains a critical bottleneck in visual reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic manipulation. In simulated environments, rewards are conventionally designed based on the distance to a target position. However, such precise…
Precise robotic manipulation skills are desirable in many industrial settings, reinforcement learning (RL) methods hold the promise of acquiring these skills autonomously. In this paper, we explicitly consider incorporating operational…
Learning-based methods have proven useful at generating complex motions for robots, including humanoids. Reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to learn locomotion policies, some of which leverage a periodic reward formulation. This work…
Learning a robot motor skill from scratch is impractically slow; so much so that in practice, learning must be bootstrapped using a good skill policy obtained from human demonstration. However, relying on human demonstration necessarily…
Construction robots are challenging the traditional paradigm of labor intensive and repetitive construction tasks. Present concerns regarding construction robots are focused on their abilities in performing complex tasks consisting of…
Despite recent advances in robust locomotion, bipedal robots operating in the real world remain at risk of falling. While most research focuses on preventing such events, we instead concentrate on the phenomenon of falling itself.…
In robotics motion is often described from an external perspective, i.e., we give information on the obstacle motion in a mathematical manner with respect to a specific (often inertial) reference frame. In the current work, we propose to…
We present a map-less path planning algorithm based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for mobile robots navigating in unknown environment that only relies on 40-dimensional raw laser data and odometry information. The planner is trained…
Understanding physical phenomena is a key competence that enables humans and animals to act and interact under uncertain perception in previously unseen environments containing novel objects and their configurations. In this work, we…
We present a framework for data-driven robotics that makes use of a large dataset of recorded robot experience and scales to several tasks using learned reward functions. We show how to apply this framework to accomplish three different…
In this paper, we present a learning-based approach that allows a robot to quickly follow a reference path defined in joint space without exceeding limits on the position, velocity, acceleration and jerk of each robot joint. Contrary to…
The ability of a soft robot to perform specific tasks is determined by its contact configuration, and transitioning between configurations is often necessary to reach a desired position or manipulate an object. Based on this observation, we…
Reproducing the diverse and agile locomotion skills of animals has been a longstanding challenge in robotics. While manually-designed controllers have been able to emulate many complex behaviors, building such controllers involves a…
Manipulating deformable objects, such as fabric, is a long standing problem in robotics, with state estimation and control posing a significant challenge for traditional methods. In this paper, we show that it is possible to learn fabric…
When robots enter everyday human environments, they need to understand their tasks and how they should perform those tasks. To encode these, reward functions, which specify the objective of a robot, are employed. However, designing reward…
Robotic manipulation in unstructured environments requires reliable execution under diverse conditions, yet many state-of-the-art systems still struggle with high-dimensional action spaces, sparse rewards, and slow generalization beyond…
Reinforcement learning provides a general framework for learning robotic skills while minimizing engineering effort. However, most reinforcement learning algorithms assume that a well-designed reward function is provided, and learn a single…
Navigation is one of the most heavily studied problems in robotics, and is conventionally approached as a geometric mapping and planning problem. However, real-world navigation presents a complex set of physical challenges that defies…