Related papers: Residual Learning from Demonstration: Adapting DMP…

To learn manipulation skills, robots need to understand the features of those skills. An easy way for robots to learn is through Learning from Demonstration (LfD), where the robot learns a skill from an expert demonstrator. While the main…

This paper introduces a discrete-continuous action space to learn insertion primitives for robotic assembly tasks. Primitive is a sequence of elementary actions with certain exit conditions, such as "pushing down the peg until contact".…

Realistic manipulation tasks require a robot to interact with an environment with a prolonged sequence of motor actions. While deep reinforcement learning methods have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for automating manipulation…

Contact-rich manipulation involves kinematic constraints on the task motion, typically with discrete transitions between these constraints during the task. Allowing the robot to detect and reason about these contact constraints can support…

Robots need to be able to adapt to unexpected changes in the environment such that they can autonomously succeed in their tasks. However, hand-designing feedback models for adaptation is tedious, if at all possible, making data-driven…

Learning from human demonstrations can facilitate automation but is risky because the execution of the learned policy might lead to collisions and other failures. Adding explicit constraints to avoid unsafe states is generally not possible…

The main novelty of the proposed approach is that it allows a robot to learn an end-to-end policy which can adapt to changes in the environment during execution. While goal conditioning of policies has been studied in the RL literature,…

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a popular method of reproducing and generalizing robot skills from human-provided demonstrations. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization-based LfD method that encodes demonstrations as elastic…

Biological systems, including human beings, have the innate ability to perform complex tasks in versatile and agile manner. Researchers in sensorimotor control have tried to understand and formally define this innate property. The idea,…

Skill-based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy to leverage prior knowledge for accelerated robot learning. Skills are typically extracted from expert demonstrations and are embedded into a latent space from…

Shifting from traditional control strategies to Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) for legged robots poses inherent challenges, especially when addressing real-world physical constraints during training. While high-fidelity simulations…

Autonomous robots require high degrees of cognitive and motoric intelligence to come into our everyday life. In non-structured environments and in the presence of uncertainties, such degrees of intelligence are not easy to obtain.…

There is an increased demand for task automation in robots. Contact-rich tasks, wherein multiple contact transitions occur in a series of operations, are extensively being studied to realize high accuracy. In this study, we propose a…

Reinforcement learning shows great potential to solve complex contact-rich robot manipulation tasks. However, the safety of using RL in the real world is a crucial problem, since unexpected dangerous collisions might happen when the RL…

Contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments often require both haptic and visual feedback. It is non-trivial to manually design a robot controller that combines these modalities which have very different characteristics.…

In this work, a novel Dynamic Movement Primitive (DMP) formulation is proposed which supports reversibility, i.e. backwards reproduction of a learned trajectory. Apart from sharing all favourable properties of the original DMP, decoupling…

Robots could learn their own state and world representation from perception and experience without supervision. This desirable goal is the main focus of our field of interest, state representation learning (SRL). Indeed, a compact…

Robot assistants for older adults and people with disabilities need to interact with their users in collaborative tasks. The core component of these systems is an interaction manager whose job is to observe and assess the task, and infer…

Learning from Demonstration is increasingly used for transferring operator manipulation skills to robots. In practice, it is important to cater for limited data and imperfect human demonstrations, as well as underlying safety constraints.…

Learning from demonstration (LfD) techniques seek to enable novice users to teach robots novel tasks in the real world. However, prior work has shown that robot-centric LfD approaches, such as Dataset Aggregation (DAgger), do not perform…