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Robots are typically described in software by specification files (e.g., URDF, SDF, MJCF, USD) that encode only basic kinematic, dynamic, and geometric information. As a result, downstream applications such as simulation, planning, and…
A major component for developing intelligent and autonomous robots is a suitable knowledge representation, from which a robot can acquire knowledge about its actions or world. However, unlike humans, robots cannot creatively adapt to novel…
The FetchIt! Mobile Manipulation Challenge, held at the IEEE International Conference on Robots and Automation (ICRA) in May 2019, offered an environment with complex and integrated task sets, irregular objects, confined space, and…
We introduce an autonomous attack recovery architecture to add common sense reasoning to plan a recovery action after an attack is detected. We outline use-cases of our architecture using drones, and then discuss how to implement this…
This investigation introduces a novel deep reinforcement learning-based suite to control floating platforms in both simulated and real-world environments. Floating platforms serve as versatile test-beds to emulate micro-gravity environments…
Adaptive recovery from fall incidents are essential skills for the practical deployment of wheeled-legged robots, which uniquely combine the agility of legs with the speed of wheels for rapid recovery. However, traditional methods relying…
Designing a good reward function is essential to robot planning and reinforcement learning, but it can also be challenging and frustrating. The reward needs to work across multiple different environments, and that often requires many…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can in principle acquire complex robotic skills by learning from large amounts of data in the real world, collected via trial and error. However, most RL algorithms use a carefully engineered setup in…
Robots are increasingly deployed in dynamic and crowded environments, such as urban areas and shopping malls, where efficient and robust navigation is crucial. Traditional risk-based motion planning algorithms face challenges in such…
The World Robotics Challenge (2018 & 2020) was designed to challenge teams to design systems that are easy to adapt to new tasks and to ensure robust operation in a semi-structured environment. We present a layered strategy to transform…
Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms provide a data-driven way to acquire policies that quickly adapt to many tasks with varying rewards or dynamics functions. However, learned meta-policies are often effective only on the exact task…
The rapidly evolving nature of Android apps poses a significant challenge to static batch machine learning algorithms employed in malware detection systems, as they quickly become obsolete. Despite this challenge, the existing literature…
Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…
Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to produce robot programs from natural language has allowed for robot systems that can complete a higher diversity of tasks. However, LLM-generated programs may be faulty, either due to ambiguity in…
Many real-world tasks are intuitive for a human to perform, but difficult to encode algorithmically when utilizing a robot to perform the tasks. In these scenarios, robotic systems can benefit from expert demonstrations to learn how to…
Context: Software Engineering (SE) experiments suffer from threats to validity that may impact their results. Replication allows researchers building on top of previous experiments' weaknesses and increasing the reliability of the findings.…
We describe a task and motion planning architecture for highly dynamic systems that combines a domain-independent sampling-based deliberative planning algorithm with a global reactive planner. We leverage the recent development of a…
Robotic assembly is a longstanding challenge, requiring contact-rich interaction and high precision and accuracy. Many applications also require adaptivity to diverse parts, poses, and environments, as well as low cycle times. In other…
Multi-step manipulation tasks where robots interact with their environment and must apply process forces based on the perceived situation remain challenging to learn and prone to execution errors. Accurately simulating these tasks is also…
Meta-reinforcement learning algorithms can enable robots to acquire new skills much more quickly, by leveraging prior experience to learn how to learn. However, much of the current research on meta-reinforcement learning focuses on task…