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Evolution in time-varying environments naturally leads to adaptable biological systems that can easily switch functionalities. Advances in the synthesis of environmentally-responsive materials therefore open up the possibility of creating a…

Human-in-the-loop learning is gaining popularity, particularly in the field of robotics, because it leverages human knowledge about real-world tasks to facilitate agent learning. When people instruct robots, they naturally adapt their…

Passive elastic elements can contribute to stability, energetic efficiency, and impact absorption in both biological and robotic systems. They also add dynamical complexity which makes them more challenging to model and control. The impact…

Stable and robust robotic grasping is essential for current and future robot applications. In recent works, the use of large datasets and supervised learning has enhanced speed and precision in antipodal grasping. However, these methods…

During learning trials, systems are exposed to different failure conditions which may break robotic parts before a safe behavior is discovered. Humans contour this problem by grounding their learning to a safer structure/control first and…

This paper investigates how learning can be used to ease the design of high-quality paths for the assembly of deformable objects. Object dynamics plays an important role when manipulating deformable objects; thus, detailed models are often…

Embodiment is a significant keyword in recent machine learning fields. This study focused on the passive nature of the body of a biped robot to generate walking and running locomotion using model-based deep reinforcement learning. We…

Bagging is an essential skill that humans perform in their daily activities. However, deformable objects, such as bags, are complex for robots to manipulate. This paper presents an efficient learning-based framework that enables robots to…

Deep learning often requires the manual collection and annotation of a training set. On robotic platforms, can we partially automate this task by training the robot to be curious, i.e., to seek out beneficial training information in the…

Humans have internal models of robots (like their physical capabilities), the world (like what will happen next), and their tasks (like a preferred goal). However, human internal models are not always perfect: for example, it is easy to…

We introduce a Task-Level Iterative Learning Control method for dynamic manipulation of ropes. We demonstrate this method on a non-planar rope manipulation task called the flying knot. Using a single human demonstration and a simplified…

Achieving athletic loco-manipulation on robots requires moving beyond traditional tracking rewards - which simply guide the robot along a reference trajectory - to task rewards that drive truly dynamic, goal-oriented behaviors. Commands…

Achieving stable and robust perceptive locomotion for bipedal robots in unstructured outdoor environments remains a critical challenge due to complex terrain geometry and susceptibility to external disturbances. In this work, we propose a…

Learning-based methods have improved locomotion skills of quadruped robots through deep reinforcement learning. However, the sim-to-real gap and low sample efficiency still limit the skill transfer. To address this issue, we propose an…

Several model-based and model-free methods have been proposed for the robot trajectory learning task. Both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks. They can usually complement each other. Many research works are trying to integrate…

Learning to produce efficient movement behaviour for humanoid robots from scratch is a hard problem, as has been illustrated by the "Learning to run" competition at NIPS 2017. The goal of this competition was to train a two-legged model of…

In this paper, we explore whether a robot can learn to regrasp a diverse set of objects to achieve various desired grasp poses. Regrasping is needed whenever a robot's current grasp pose fails to perform desired manipulation tasks. Endowing…

Reinforcement learning (RL) for bipedal locomotion has recently demonstrated robust gaits over moderate terrains using only proprioceptive sensing. However, such blind controllers will fail in environments where robots must anticipate and…

Geometric methods for solving open-world off-road navigation tasks, by learning occupancy and metric maps, provide good generalization but can be brittle in outdoor environments that violate their assumptions (e.g., tall grass).…

Chip placement is a critical step in physical design. While reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods have recently emerged, their training primarily focuses on wirelength optimization, and therefore often fail to achieve expert-quality…