Related papers: Active model learning and diverse action sampling …

Model-based approaches bear great promise for decision making of agents interacting with the physical world. In the context of spatial environments, different types of problems such as localisation, mapping, navigation or autonomous…

For successful goal-directed human-robot interaction, the robot should adapt to the intentions and actions of the collaborating human. This can be supported by musculoskeletal or data-driven human models, where the former are limited to…

Exploration is a fundamental problem in robotics. While sampling-based planners have shown high performance, they are oftentimes compute intensive and can exhibit high variance. To this end, we propose to directly learn the underlying…

Robots in uncertain real-world environments must perform both goal-directed and exploratory actions. However, most deep learning-based control methods neglect exploration and struggle under uncertainty. To address this, we adopt deep active…

Robotics has dramatically increased our ability to gather data about our environments, creating an opportunity for the robotics and algorithms communities to collaborate on novel solutions to environmental monitoring problems. To understand…

Multi-robot manipulation tasks involve various control entities that can be separated into dynamically independent parts. A typical example of such real-world tasks is dual-arm manipulation. Learning to naively solve such tasks with…

This work presents an efficient framework to generate a motion plan of a robot with high degrees of freedom (e.g., a humanoid robot). High-dimensionality of the robot configuration space often leads to difficulties in utilizing the…

This paper considers multi-goal motion planning in unstructured, obstacle-rich environments where a robot is required to reach multiple regions while avoiding collisions. The planned motions must also satisfy the differential constraints…

In recent years, learning-based approaches have revolutionized motion planning. The data generation process for these methods involves caching a large number of high quality paths for different queries (start, goal pairs) in various…

Industrial robotic manipulation demands reliable long-horizon execution across embodiments, tasks, and changing object distributions. While Vision-Language-Action models have demonstrated strong generalization, they remain fundamentally…

Robot control policies for temporally extended and sequenced tasks are often characterized by discontinuous switches between different local dynamics. These change-points are often exploited in hierarchical motion planning to build…

Adaptable models could greatly benefit robotic agents operating in the real world, allowing them to deal with novel and varying conditions. While approaches such as Bayesian inference are well-studied frameworks for adapting models to…

Autonomous robots need to be able to adapt to unforeseen situations and to acquire new skills through trial and error. Reinforcement learning in principle offers a suitable methodological framework for this kind of autonomous learning.…

Randomized sampling based algorithms are widely used in robot motion planning due to the problem's intractability, and are experimentally effective on a wide range of problem instances. Most variants do not sample uniformly at random, and…

Efficient motion planning algorithms are of central importance for deploying robots in the real world. Unfortunately, these algorithms often drastically reduce the dimensionality of the problem for the sake of feasibility, thereby foregoing…

The ability to plan with temporal abstractions is central to intelligent decision-making. Rather than reasoning over primitive actions, we study agents that compose pre-trained policies as temporally extended actions, enabling solutions to…

This dissertation considers Open-world Robot Manipulation, a manipulation problem where a robot must generalize or quickly adapt to new objects, scenes, or tasks for which it has not been pre-programmed or pre-trained. This dissertation…

While modern policy optimization methods can do complex manipulation from sensory data, they struggle on problems with extended time horizons and multiple sub-goals. On the other hand, task and motion planning (TAMP) methods scale to long…

This paper explores general multi-robot task and motion planning, where multiple robots in close proximity manipulate objects while satisfying constraints and a given goal. In particular, we formulate the plan refinement problem--which,…

Real-world robots are becoming increasingly complex and commonly act in poorly understood environments where it is extremely challenging to model or learn their true dynamics. Therefore, it might be desirable to take a task-specific…