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In recent years, fully differentiable rigid body physics simulators have been developed, which can be used to simulate a wide range of robotic systems. In the context of reinforcement learning for control, these simulators theoretically…
Policy gradient methods are powerful reinforcement learning algorithms and have been demonstrated to solve many complex tasks. However, these methods are also data-inefficient, afflicted with high variance gradient estimates, and frequently…
Navigating urban environments represents a complex task for automated vehicles. They must reach their goal safely and efficiently while considering a multitude of traffic participants. We propose a modular decision making algorithm to…
In this work, we introduce a stochastic maximum principle (SMP) approach for solving the reinforcement learning problem with the assumption that the unknowns in the environment can be parameterized based on physics knowledge. For the…
For the deployment of legged robots in real-world environments, it is essential to develop robust locomotion control methods for challenging terrains that may exhibit unexpected deformability and irregularity. In this paper, we explore the…
This paper presents a method for identifying mechanical parameters of robots or objects, such as their mass and friction coefficients. Key features are the use of off-the-shelf physics engines and the adaptation of a Bayesian optimization…
Humans are highly adept at walking in environments with foot placement constraints, including stepping-stone scenarios where the footstep locations are fully constrained. Finding good solutions to stepping-stone locomotion is a longstanding…
A key ingredient to achieving intelligent behavior is physical understanding that equips robots with the ability to reason about the effects of their actions in a dynamic environment. Several methods have been proposed to learn dynamics…
For robotic vehicles to navigate robustly and safely in unseen environments, it is crucial to decide the most suitable navigation policy. However, most existing deep reinforcement learning based navigation policies are trained with a…
Understanding physical phenomena is a key component of human intelligence and enables physical interaction with previously unseen environments. In this paper, we study how an artificial agent can autonomously acquire this intuition through…
We present a reinforcement learning-based solution to autonomously race on a miniature race car platform. We show that a policy that is trained purely in simulation using a relatively simple vehicle model, including model randomization, can…
Model-based next state prediction and state value prediction are slow to converge. To address these challenges, we do the following: i) Instead of a neural network, we do model-based planning using a parallel memory retrieval system (which…
Human character animation is often critical in entertainment content production, including video games, virtual reality or fiction films. To this end, deep neural networks drive most recent advances through deep learning and deep…
Autonomous learning of robotic skills can allow general-purpose robots to learn wide behavioral repertoires without requiring extensive manual engineering. However, robotic skill learning methods typically make one of several trade-offs to…
We study a class of constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which multiple constraint specifications are not identified before training. It is challenging to identify appropriate constraint specifications due to the undefined…
Learning to play table tennis is a challenging task for robots, as a wide variety of strokes required. Recent advances have shown that deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is able to successfully learn the optimal actions in a simulated…
Motion mimicking is a foundational task in physics-based character animation. However, most existing motion mimicking methods are built upon reinforcement learning (RL) and suffer from heavy reward engineering, high variance, and slow…
Designing a stabilizing controller for nonlinear systems is a challenging task, especially for high-dimensional problems with unknown dynamics. Traditional reinforcement learning algorithms applied to stabilization tasks tend to drive the…
Learning to locomote is one of the most common tasks in physics-based animation and deep reinforcement learning (RL). A learned policy is the product of the problem to be solved, as embodied by the RL environment, and the RL algorithm.…
Learning agents that excel at sequential decision-making tasks must continuously resolve the problem of exploration and exploitation for optimal learning. However, such interactions with the environment online might be prohibitively…