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The \textit{de facto} paradigm for applying dense retrieval (DR) to new tasks involves fine-tuning a pre-trained model for a specific task. However, this paradigm has two significant limitations: (1) It is difficult adapt the DR to a new…

Quadrupedal robots have emerged as a cutting-edge platform for assisting humans, finding applications in tasks related to inspection and exploration in remote areas. Nevertheless, their floating base structure renders them susceptible to…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is emerging as a promising approach to generate adaptive behaviors for robotic platforms. However, a major drawback of using DRL is the data-hungry training regime that requires millions of trial and error…

This position paper looks briefly at the way we attempt to program robotic AI systems. Many AI systems are based on the idea of trying to improve the performance of one individual system to beyond so-called human baselines. However, these…

Test Driven Development (TDD) is one of the major practices of Extreme Programming for which incremental testing and refactoring trigger the code development. TDD has limited adoption in the industry, as it requires more code to be…

Risk assessment of a robot in controlled environments, such as laboratories and proving grounds, is a common means to assess, certify, validate, verify, and characterize the robots' safety performance before, during, and even after their…

Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to developing hard-to-engineer adaptive solutions for complex and diverse robotic tasks. However, learning with real-world robots is often unreliable and difficult, which resulted in their low…

Reactive trajectory optimization for robotics presents formidable challenges, demanding the rapid generation of purposeful robot motion in complex and swiftly changing dynamic environments. While much existing research predominantly…

As software development increasingly adopts automation, bot-driven development (BotDD) represents a transformative shift where bots assume proactive roles in coding, testing, and project management. In bot-driven development, bots go beyond…

As reinforcement learning (RL) achieves more success in solving complex tasks, more care is needed to ensure that RL research is reproducible and that algorithms herein can be compared easily and fairly with minimal bias. RL results are,…

Path planning is an important problem with the the applications in many aspects, such as video games, robotics etc. This paper proposes a novel method to address the problem of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based path planning for a…

The World Robot Summit (WRS) 2020 Assembly Challenge is designed to allow teams to demonstrate how one can build flexible, robust systems for assembly of machined objects. We present our approach to assembly based on integration of machine…

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for autonomously acquiring complex behaviors from low level sensor observations. Although a large portion of deep RL research has focused on applications in video games…

In real-world environments, robots need to be resilient to damages and robust to unforeseen scenarios. Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms have been successfully used to make robots adapt to damages in seconds by leveraging a diverse set of…

Real-time multi-view 3D reconstruction is a mission-critical application for key edge-native use cases, such as fire rescue, where timely and accurate 3D scene modeling enables situational awareness and informed decision-making. However,…

Accurate depth estimation under out-of-distribution (OoD) scenarios, such as adverse weather conditions, sensor failure, and noise contamination, is desirable for safety-critical applications. Existing depth estimation systems, however,…

A random recurrent neural network, called a reservoir, can be used to learn robot movements conditioned on context inputs that encode task goals. The Learning is achieved by mapping the random dynamics of the reservoir modulated by context…

Robots have become increasingly prevalent in dynamic and crowded environments such as airports and shopping malls. In these scenarios, the critical challenges for robot navigation are reliability and timely arrival at predetermined…

Despite the impressive progress achieved in robotic grasping, robots are not skilled in sophisticated tasks (e.g. search and grasp a specified target in clutter). Such tasks involve not only grasping but the comprehensive perception of the…

To achieve general-purpose utility, we argue that robots must evolve from passive executors into active Information Retrieval users. In strictly zero-shot settings where no prior demonstrations exist, robots face a critical information gap,…