Related papers: Towards Physically Safe Reinforcement Learning und…
Likelihood-based policy gradient methods are the dominant approach for training robot control policies from rewards. These methods rely on differentiable action likelihoods, which constrain policy outputs to simple distributions like…
Unsupervised pretraining, which learns a useful representation using a large amount of unlabeled data to facilitate the learning of downstream tasks, is a critical component of modern large-scale machine learning systems. Despite its…
A longstanding goal in safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a method to ensure the safety of a policy throughout the entire process, from learning to operation. However, existing safe RL paradigms inherently struggle to achieve this…
In recent years deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems have attained superhuman performance in a number of challenging task domains. However, a major limitation of such applications is their demand for massive amounts of training data. A…
Most policy search algorithms require thousands of training episodes to find an effective policy, which is often infeasible with a physical robot. This survey article focuses on the extreme other end of the spectrum: how can a robot adapt…
We study the problem of policy repair for learning-based control policies in safety-critical settings. We consider an architecture where a high-performance learning-based control policy (e.g. one trained as a neural network) is paired with…
Control policy learning for modular robot locomotion has previously been limited to proprioceptive feedback and flat terrain. This paper develops policies for modular systems with vision traversing more challenging environments. These…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great success in learning complex control policies for a variety of applications in robotics. However, in most such cases, the hardware of the robot has been considered immutable, modeled as part…
Questions remain on the robustness of data-driven learning methods when crossing the gap from simulation to reality. We utilize weight anchoring, a method known from continual learning, to cultivate and fixate desired behavior in Neural…
Soft robots offer more flexibility, compliance, and adaptability than traditional rigid robots. They are also typically lighter and cheaper to manufacture. However, their use in real-world applications is limited due to modeling challenges…
In this paper, we present a method to control a quadrotor with a neural network trained using reinforcement learning techniques. With reinforcement learning, a common network can be trained to directly map state to actuator command making…
Generalizability of Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents (ability to perform on environments different from the ones they have been trained on) is a key problem as agents have the tendency to overfit to their training environments. In order…
A reinforcement learning (RL) control policy could fail in a new/perturbed environment that is different from the training environment, due to the presence of dynamic variations. For controlling systems with continuous state and action…
Robot-assisted dressing could profoundly enhance the quality of life of adults with physical disabilities. To achieve this, a robot can benefit from both visual and force sensing. The former enables the robot to ascertain human body pose…
Reinforcement learning is a powerful paradigm for learning optimal policies from experimental data. However, to find optimal policies, most reinforcement learning algorithms explore all possible actions, which may be harmful for real-world…
Purpose: This study aims to address the challenges of controlling unstable and nonlinear systems by proposing an adaptive PID controller based on predictive reinforcement learning (PRL-PID), where the PRL-PID combines the advantages of both…
This paper presents the concept of an adaptive safe padding that forces Reinforcement Learning (RL) to synthesise optimal control policies while ensuring safety during the learning process. Policies are synthesised to satisfy a goal,…
We are motivated by the real challenges presented in a human-robot system to develop new designs that are efficient at data level and with performance guarantees such as stability and optimality at systems level. Existing…
In safety-critical applications, autonomous agents may need to learn in an environment where mistakes can be very costly. In such settings, the agent needs to behave safely not only after but also while learning. To achieve this, existing…
The effectiveness of scaling up training data in robotic manipulation is still limited. A primary challenge in manipulation is the tasks are diverse, and the trained policy would be confused if the task targets are not specified clearly.…