Related papers: Towards Crossing the Reality Gap with Evolved Plas…
Robotic airships offer significant advantages in terms of safety, mobility, and extended flight times. However, their highly restrictive weight constraints pose a major challenge regarding the available computational resources to perform…
This paper presents a vehicle lateral controller based on spiking neural networks capable of replicating the behavior of a model-based controller but with the additional ability to perform online adaptation. By making use of neural…
To address the computational challenges of Model Predictive Control (MPC), recent research has studied using imitation learning to approximate MPC with a computationally efficient Deep Neural Network (DNN). However, this introduces a common…
Developing robot controllers in a simulated environment is advantageous but transferring the controllers to the target environment presents challenges, often referred to as the "sim-to-real gap". We present a method for continuous…
Air hockey demands split-second decisions at high puck velocities, a challenge we address with a compact network of spiking neurons running on a mixed-signal analog/digital neuromorphic processor. By co-designing hardware and learning…
Navigation and manipulation are core capabilities in Embodied AI, yet training agents with these capabilities in the real world faces high costs and time complexity. Therefore, sim-to-real transfer has emerged as a key approach, yet the…
Drones which can swarm and loiter in a certain area cost hundreds of dollars, but mosquitos can do the same and are essentially worthless. To control swarms of low-cost robots, researchers may end up spending countless hours brainstorming…
The brain can learn to execute a wide variety of tasks quickly and efficiently. Nevertheless, most of the mechanisms that enable us to learn are unclear or incredibly complicated. Recently, considerable efforts have been made in…
We address the longstanding challenge of producing flexible, realistic humanoid character controllers that can perform diverse whole-body tasks involving object interactions. This challenge is central to a variety of fields, from graphics…
Continuous adaptation allows survival in an ever-changing world. Adjustments in the synaptic coupling strength between neurons are essential for this capability, setting us apart from simpler, hard-wired organisms. How these changes can be…
Quadruped robots have strong adaptability to extreme environments but may also experience faults. Once these faults occur, robots must be repaired before returning to the task, reducing their practical feasibility. One prevalent concern…
Sim-to-real transfer remains a fundamental challenge in robot manipulation due to the entanglement of perception and control in end-to-end learning. We present a decoupled framework that learns each component where it is most reliable:…
In this paper, we deal with the reality gap from a novel perspective, targeting transferring Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policies learned in simulated environments to the real-world domain for visual control tasks. Instead of adopting…
Unlike traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs), biological neuronal networks solve complex cognitive tasks with sparse neuronal activity, recurrent connections, and local learning rules. These mechanisms serve as design principles in…
While deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods have achieved unprecedented successes in a range of challenging problems, their applicability has been mainly limited to simulation or game domains due to the high sample complexity of the…
We present a novel solution to the problem of simulation-to-real transfer, which builds on recent advances in robot skill decomposition. Rather than focusing on minimizing the simulation-reality gap, we learn a set of diverse policies that…
Automating the navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in diverse scenarios has gained much attention in recent years. However, teaching UAVs to fly in challenging environments remains an unsolved problem, mainly due to the lack of…
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a biologically plausible learning mechanism through synaptic plasticity, enabling unsupervised adaptation without the computational overhead of backpropagation. To harness this capability for robotics,…
Many swarm robotics tasks consist of multiple conflicting objectives. This research proposes a multi-objective evolutionary neural network approach to developing controllers for swarms of robots. The swarm robot controllers are trained in a…
Inspired by the natural nervous system, synaptic plasticity rules are applied to train spiking neural networks with local information, making them suitable for online learning on neuromorphic hardware. However, when such rules are…