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Temporal-network models have provided key insights into how time-varying connectivity shapes dynamical processes such as spreading. Among them, the activity-driven model is a widely used, analytically tractable benchmark. Yet many temporal…
Modeling how a robot interacts with the environment around it is an important prerequisite for designing control and planning algorithms. In fact, the performance of controllers and planners is highly dependent on the quality of the model.…
Model-free reinforcement learning algorithms can compute policy gradients given sampled environment transitions, but require large amounts of data. In contrast, model-based methods can use the learned model to generate new data, but model…
Pushing is a motion primitive useful to handle objects that are too large, too heavy, or too cluttered to be grasped. It is at the core of much of robotic manipulation, in particular when physical interaction is involved. It seems…
In reinforcement learning, we can learn a model of future observations and rewards, and use it to plan the agent's next actions. However, jointly modeling future observations can be computationally expensive or even intractable if the…
Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is widely believed to have the potential to improve sample efficiency by allowing an agent to synthesize large amounts of imagined experience. Experience Replay (ER) can be considered a simple kind of…
Many of us researchers take extra measures to control for known-unknowns. However, unknown-unknowns can, at best, be negligible, but otherwise, they could produce unreliable data that might have dire consequences in real-life downstream…
Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…
A new framework is developed for control of constrained nonlinear systems with structured parametric uncertainties. Forward invariance of a safe set is achieved through online parameter adaptation and data-driven model estimation. The new…
There are several challenges in developing a model for multi-tasking humanoid control. Reinforcement learning and imitation learning approaches are quite popular in this domain. However, there is a trade-off between the two. Reinforcement…
Predictive control, which is based on a model of the system to compute the applied input optimizing the future system behavior, is by now widely used. If the nominal models are not given or are very uncertain, data-driven model predictive…
Soft robots are typically approximated as low-dimensional systems, especially when learning-based methods are used. This leads to models that are limited in their capability to predict the large number of deformation modes and interactions…
Decades of research in control theory have shown that simple controllers, when provided with timely feedback, can control complex systems. Pushing is an example of a complex mechanical system that is difficult to model accurately due to…
Robots need to be able to adapt to unexpected changes in the environment such that they can autonomously succeed in their tasks. However, hand-designing feedback models for adaptation is tedious, if at all possible, making data-driven…
Growing demands in the semiconductor industry result in the need for enhanced performance of lithographic equipment. However, position tracking accuracy of high precision mechatronics is often limited by the presence of disturbance sources,…
Navigation problems under unknown varying conditions are among the most important and well-studied problems in the control field. Classic model-based adaptive control methods can be applied only when a convenient model of the plant or…
While visuomotor policy has made advancements in recent years, contact-rich tasks still remain a challenge. Robotic manipulation tasks that require continuous contact demand explicit handling of compliance and force. However, most…
Learning contact-rich manipulation skills is essential. Such skills require the robots to interact with the environment with feasible manipulation trajectories and suitable compliance control parameters to enable safe and stable contact.…
Data Science advances in sports commonly involve "big data", i.e., large sport-related data sets. However, such big data sets are not always available, necessitating specialized models that apply to relatively few observations. One…
Legged robots are well-suited for broad exploration tasks in complex environments with yielding terrain. Understanding robotic foot-terrain interactions is critical for safe locomotion and walking efficiency for legged robots. This paper…