Related papers: Long-Horizon Prediction and Uncertainty Propagatio…

With the maturation of differentiable physics, its role in various downstream applications: such as model predictive control, robotic design optimization, and neural PDE solvers, has become increasingly important. However, the derivative…

The ability to reason about and predict the outcome of contacts is paramount to the successful execution of many robot tasks. Analytical rigid-body contact models are used extensively in planning and control due to their computational…

Robotic manipulation can greatly benefit from the data efficiency, robustness, and predictability of model-based methods if robots can quickly generate models of novel objects they encounter. This is especially difficult when effects like…

Humans leverage the dynamics of the environment and their own bodies to accomplish challenging tasks such as grasping an object while walking past it or pushing off a wall to turn a corner. Such tasks often involve switching dynamics as the…

The hybrid nature of multi-contact robotic systems, due to making and breaking contact with the environment, creates significant challenges for high-quality control. Existing model-based methods typically rely on either good prior knowledge…

Predictive models have been at the core of many robotic systems, from quadrotors to walking robots. However, it has been challenging to develop and apply such models to practical robotic manipulation due to high-dimensional sensory…

Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…

Conventional feedback control methods can solve various types of robot control problems very efficiently by capturing the structure with explicit models, such as rigid body equations of motion. However, many control problems in modern…

In this paper, we explore an approach to actively plan and excite contact modes in differentiable simulators as a means to tighten the sim-to-real gap. We propose an optimal experimental design approach derived from information-theoretic…

Differentiable simulators promise to improve sample efficiency in robot learning by providing analytic gradients of the system dynamics. Yet, their application to contact-rich tasks like locomotion is complicated by the inherently…

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…

A key ingredient to achieving intelligent behavior is physical understanding that equips robots with the ability to reason about the effects of their actions in a dynamic environment. Several methods have been proposed to learn dynamics…

An efficient, generalizable physical simulator with universal uncertainty estimates has wide applications in robot state estimation, planning, and control. In this paper, we build such a simulator for two scenarios, planar pushing and ball…

This paper presents a novel approach that combines the advantages of both model-based and learning-based frameworks to achieve robust locomotion. The residual modules are integrated with each corresponding part of the model-based framework,…

Humans demonstrate an impressive ability to acquire and generalize manipulation "tricks." Even from a single demonstration, such as using soup ladles to reach for distant objects, we can apply this skill to new scenarios involving different…

This paper is concerned with learning transferable forward models for push manipulation that can be applying to novel contexts and how to improve the quality of prediction when critical information is available. We propose to learn a…

Learning contact-rich manipulation skills is essential. Such skills require the robots to interact with the environment with feasible manipulation trajectories and suitable compliance control parameters to enable safe and stable contact.…

While classic control theory offers state of the art solutions in many problem scenarios, it is often desired to improve beyond the structure of such solutions and surpass their limitations. To this end, residual policy learning (RPL)…

High-fidelity physics simulation is essential for scalable robotic learning, but the sim-to-real gap persists, especially for tasks involving complex, dynamic, and discontinuous interactions like physical contacts. Explicit system…

This paper presents a data-efficient approach to learning transferable forward models for robotic push manipulation. Our approach extends our previous work on contact-based predictors by leveraging information on the pushed object's local…