Related papers: Stochastic Grounded Action Transformation for Robo…

Learning a generalist control policy for dexterous manipulation typically relies on large-scale datasets. Given the high cost of real-world data collection, a practical alternative is to generate synthetic data through simulation. However,…

Simulation-to-reality transfer has emerged as a popular and highly successful method to train robotic control policies for a wide variety of tasks. However, it is often challenging to determine when policies trained in simulation are ready…

Imitation learning is a data-driven approach to acquiring skills that relies on expert demonstrations to learn a policy that maps observations to actions. When performing demonstrations, experts are not always consistent and might…

Training robotic policies directly in the real world is expensive and unscalable. Although generative simulation enables large-scale data synthesis, current approaches often fail to generate logically coherent long-horizon tasks and…

Stochastic-gradient-based optimization has been a core enabling methodology in applications to large-scale problems in machine learning and related areas. Despite the progress, the gap between theory and practice remains significant, with…

Terrain adaptation is an essential capability for a ground robot to effectively traverse unstructured off-road terrain in real-world field environments such as forests. However, the expected robot behaviors generated by terrain adaptation…

Reinforcement learning often requires extensive training data. Simulation-to-real transfer offers a promising approach to address this challenge in robotics. While differentiable simulators offer improved sample efficiency through exact…

The field of robotics has made significant advances towards generalist robot manipulation policies. However, real-world evaluation of such policies is not scalable and faces reproducibility challenges, which are likely to worsen as policies…

Learning effective visuomotor policies for robots purely from data is challenging, but also appealing since a learning-based system should not require manual tuning or calibration. In the case of a robot operating in a real environment the…

Learning robotic control policies in the real world gives rise to challenges in data efficiency, safety, and controlling the initial condition of the system. On the other hand, simulations are a useful alternative as they provide an…

Sim-to-real transfer remains a major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) for robotics, as policies trained in simulation often fail to generalize to the real world due to discrepancies in environment dynamics. Domain Randomization (DR)…

Understanding the gap between simulation and reality is critical for reinforcement learning with legged robots, which are largely trained in simulation. However, recent work has resulted in sometimes conflicting conclusions with regard to…

Domain randomization (DR) is a successful technique for learning robust policies for robot systems, when the dynamics of the target robot system are unknown. The success of policies trained with domain randomization however, is highly…

Many applications of imitation learning require the agent to generate the full distribution of behaviour observed in the training data. For example, to evaluate the safety of autonomous vehicles in simulation, accurate and diverse behaviour…

Training generalist policies for robotic manipulation has shown great promise, as they enable language-conditioned, multi-task behaviors across diverse scenarios. However, evaluating these policies remains difficult because real-world…

Learning-based approaches often outperform hand-coded algorithmic solutions for many problems in robotics. However, learning long-horizon tasks on real robot hardware can be intractable, and transferring a learned policy from simulation to…

Legged robots must achieve both robust locomotion and energy efficiency to be practical in real-world environments. Yet controllers trained in simulation often fail to transfer reliably, and most existing approaches neglect…

Tendon drives paired with soft muscle actuation enable faster and safer robots while potentially accelerating skill acquisition. Still, these systems are rarely used in practice due to inherent nonlinearities, friction, and hysteresis,…

Although recent advances in machine learning have shown its success to learn from independent and identically distributed (IID) data, it is vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) data in an open world. Domain generalization (DG) deals with…

The high cost of real-world data for robotics Reinforcement Learning (RL) leads to the wide usage of simulators. Despite extensive work on building better dynamics models for simulators to match with the real world, there is another,…