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Humans naturally exploit haptic feedback during contact-rich tasks like loading a dishwasher or stocking a bookshelf. Current robotic systems focus on avoiding unexpected contact, often relying on strategically placed environment sensors.…

Reinforcement learning systems have the potential to enable continuous improvement in unstructured environments, leveraging data collected autonomously. However, in practice these systems require significant amounts of instrumentation or…

Humans are able to seamlessly visually imitate others, by inferring their intentions and using past experience to achieve the same end goal. In other words, we can parse complex semantic knowledge from raw video and efficiently translate…

Human-robot collaboration aims to extend human ability through cooperation with robots. This technology is currently helping people with physical disabilities, has transformed the manufacturing process of companies, improved surgical…

Recent advances in robot learning have enabled robots to become increasingly better at mastering a predefined set of tasks. On the other hand, as humans, we have the ability to learn a growing set of tasks over our lifetime. Continual robot…

With growing access to versatile robotics, it is beneficial for end users to be able to teach robots tasks without needing to code a control policy. One possibility is to teach the robot through successful task executions. However,…

During physical human robot collaboration, it is important to be able to implement a time-varying interactive behaviour while ensuring robust stability. Admittance control and passivity theory can be exploited for achieving these…

Learning from demonstrations enables experts to teach robots complex tasks using interfaces such as kinesthetic teaching, joystick control, and sim-to-real transfer. However, these interfaces often constrain the expert's ability to…

The combination of deep neural network models and reinforcement learning algorithms can make it possible to learn policies for robotic behaviors that directly read in raw sensory inputs, such as camera images, effectively subsuming both…

Computer simulation provides an automatic and safe way for training robotic control policies to achieve complex tasks such as locomotion. However, a policy trained in simulation usually does not transfer directly to the real hardware due to…

We present a general, two-stage reinforcement learning approach to create robust policies that can be deployed on real robots without any additional training using a single demonstration generated by trajectory optimization. The…

We present a method for teaching dexterous manipulation tasks to robots from human hand motion demonstrations. Unlike existing approaches that solely rely on kinematics information without taking into account the plausibility of robot and…

Handing objects to humans is an essential capability for collaborative robots. Previous research works on human-robot handovers focus on facilitating the performance of the human partner and possibly minimising the physical effort needed to…

Endowed with higher levels of autonomy, robots are required to perform increasingly complex manipulation tasks. Learning from demonstration is arising as a promising paradigm for transferring skills to robots. It allows to implicitly learn…

This work aims to learn how to perform complex robot manipulation tasks that are composed of several, consecutively executed low-level sub-tasks, given as input a few visual demonstrations of the tasks performed by a person. The sub-tasks…

Generalizing skill policies to novel conditions remains a key challenge in robot learning. Imitation learning methods, while data-efficient, are largely confined to the training region and consistently fail on input data outside it, leading…

It is doubtful that animals have perfect inverse models of their limbs (e.g., what muscle contraction must be applied to every joint to reach a particular location in space). However, in robot control, moving an arm's end-effector to a…

Simulations are attractive environments for training agents as they provide an abundant source of data and alleviate certain safety concerns during the training process. But the behaviours developed by agents in simulation are often…

Much like humans, robots should have the ability to leverage knowledge from previously learned tasks in order to learn new tasks quickly in new and unfamiliar environments. Despite this, most robot learning approaches have focused on…

We investigate the use of prior knowledge of human and animal movement to learn reusable locomotion skills for real legged robots. Our approach builds upon previous work on imitating human or dog Motion Capture (MoCap) data to learn a…