Related papers: Sim2Real2Sim: Bridging the Gap Between Simulation …

Identifying predictive world models for robots in novel environments from sparse online observations is essential for robot task planning and execution in novel environments. However, existing methods that leverage differentiable…

Differentiable simulators provide an avenue for closing the sim-to-real gap by enabling the use of efficient, gradient-based optimization algorithms to find the simulation parameters that best fit the observed sensor readings. Nonetheless,…

Accurately modeling soft robots in simulation is computationally expensive and commonly falls short of representing the real world. This well-known discrepancy, known as the sim-to-real gap, can have several causes, such as coarsely…

Designing agile locomotion for quadruped robots often requires extensive expertise and tedious manual tuning. In this paper, we present a system to automate this process by leveraging deep reinforcement learning techniques. Our system can…

Deformable object manipulation is a classical and challenging research area in robotics. Compared with rigid object manipulation, this problem is more complex due to the deformation properties including elastic, plastic, and elastoplastic…

The ability to manipulate tools significantly expands the set of tasks a robot can perform. Yet, tool manipulation represents a challenging class of dexterity, requiring grasping thin objects, in-hand object rotations, and forceful…

Deep Reinforcement Learning has proved to be able to solve many control tasks in different fields, but the behavior of these systems is not always as expected when deployed in real-world scenarios. This is mainly due to the lack of domain…

Developing control policies in simulation is often more practical and safer than directly running experiments in the real world. This applies to policies obtained from planning and optimization, and even more so to policies obtained from…

We explore sim-to-real transfer of deep reinforcement learning controllers for a heavy vehicle with active suspensions designed for traversing rough terrain. While related research primarily focuses on lightweight robots with electric…

Autonomy in robotic surgery is very challenging in unstructured environments, especially when interacting with deformable soft tissues. The main difficulty is to generate model-based control methods that account for deformation dynamics…

Policies trained in simulation often fail when transferred to the real world due to the `reality gap' where the simulator is unable to accurately capture the dynamics and visual properties of the real world. Current approaches to tackle…

Safety is a critical component of autonomous systems and remains a challenge for learning-based policies to be utilized in the real world. In particular, policies learned using reinforcement learning often fail to generalize to novel…

Long-term user engagement (LTE) optimization in sequential recommender systems (SRS) is shown to be suited by reinforcement learning (RL) which finds a policy to maximize long-term rewards. Meanwhile, RL has its shortcomings, particularly…

Robotic manipulation of slender objects is challenging, especially when the induced deformations are large and nonlinear. Traditionally, learning-based control approaches, such as imitation learning, have been used to address deformable…

Recent progress in GPU-accelerated, photorealistic simulation has opened a scalable data-generation path for robot learning, where massive physics and visual randomization allow policies to generalize beyond curated environments. Building…

Randomization is currently a widely used approach in Sim2Real transfer for data-driven learning algorithms in robotics. Still, most Sim2Real studies report results for a specific randomization technique and often on a highly customized…

Accurate simulation of soft mechanisms under dynamic actuation is critical for the design of soft robots. We address this gap with our differentiable simulation tool by learning the material parameters of our soft robotic fish. On the…

Advancements in graphics technology has increased the use of simulated data for training machine learning models. However, the simulated data often differs from real-world data, creating a distribution gap that can decrease the efficacy of…

Simulators are powerful tools for reasoning about a robot's interactions with its environment. However, when simulations diverge from reality, that reasoning becomes less useful. In this paper, we show how to close the loop between liquid…

To catch a thrown object, a robot must be able to perceive the object's motion and generate control actions in a timely manner. Rather than explicitly estimating the object's 3D position, this work focuses on a novel approach that…