Related papers: Simulator Predictive Control: Using Learned Task R…

For the task with complicated manipulation in unstructured environments, traditional hand-coded methods are ineffective, while reinforcement learning can provide more general and useful policy. Although the reinforcement learning is able to…

We focus on the problem of teaching a robot to solve tasks presented sequentially, i.e., in a continual learning scenario. The robot should be able to solve all tasks it has encountered, without forgetting past tasks. We provide preliminary…

For a robot to learn a good policy, it often requires expensive equipment (such as sophisticated sensors) and a prepared training environment conducive to learning. However, it is seldom possible to perfectly equip robots for economic…

Sampling-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a flexible control framework that can reason about non-smooth dynamics and cost functions. Recently, significant work has focused on the use of machine learning to improve the performance of…

Model predictive control (MPC) is a popular control method that has proved effective for robotics, among other fields. MPC performs re-planning at every time step. Re-planning is done with a limited horizon per computational and real-time…

This paper proposes an approach to domain transfer based on a pairwise loss function that helps transfer control policies learned in simulation onto a real robot. We explore the idea in the context of a 'category level' manipulation task…

Robots must integrate multiple sensory modalities to act effectively in the real world. Yet, learning such multimodal policies at scale remains challenging. Simulation offers a viable solution, but while vision has benefited from…

Simulation offers a scalable and efficient alternative to real-world data collection for learning visuomotor robotic policies. However, the simulation-to-reality, or Sim2Real distribution shift -- introduced by employing simulation-trained…

End-to-end approaches to autonomous driving have high sample complexity and are difficult to scale to realistic urban driving. Simulation can help end-to-end driving systems by providing a cheap, safe, and diverse training environment. Yet…

Imitation Learning uses the demonstrations of an expert to uncover the optimal policy and it is suitable for real-world robotics tasks as well. In this case, however, the training of the agent is carried out in a simulation environment due…

We present a large empirical investigation on the use of pre-trained visual representations (PVRs) for training downstream policies that execute real-world tasks. Our study involves five different PVRs, each trained for five distinct…

Nonprehensile manipulation involves long horizon underactuated object interactions and physical contact with different objects that can inherently introduce a high degree of uncertainty. In this work, we introduce a novel Real-to-Sim reward…

The framework of Simulation-to-real learning, i.e, learning policies in simulation and transferring those policies to the real world is one of the most promising approaches towards data-efficient learning in robotics. However, due to the…

We consider the problem of learning structured, closed-loop policies (feedback laws) from demonstrations in order to control under-actuated robotic systems, so that formal behavioral specifications such as reaching a target set of states…

Trial-and-error based reinforcement learning (RL) has seen rapid advancements in recent times, especially with the advent of deep neural networks. However, the majority of autonomous RL algorithms require a large number of interactions with…

Model predictive control (MPC) provides a useful means for controlling systems with constraints, but suffers from the computational burden of repeatedly solving an optimization problem in real time. Offline (explicit) solutions for MPC…

One fundamental difficulty in robotic learning is the sim-real gap problem. In this work, we propose to use segmentation as the interface between perception and control, as a domain-invariant state representation. We identify two sources of…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated a huge potential in learning optimal policies without any prior knowledge of the process to be controlled. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a popular control technique which is able to deal with…

High-fidelity physics simulation is essential for scalable robotic learning, but the sim-to-real gap persists, especially for tasks involving complex, dynamic, and discontinuous interactions like physical contacts. Explicit system…

Biomimetic and compliant robotic hands offer the potential for human-like dexterity, but controlling them is challenging due to high dimensionality, complex contact interactions, and uncertainties in state estimation. Sampling-based model…