Related papers: Learning Reactive and Predictive Differentiable Co…
Amphibious legged robots inspired by salamanders are promising in applications in complex amphibious environments. However, despite the significant success of training controllers that achieve diverse locomotion behaviors in conventional…
Robotic fabric manipulation is challenging due to the infinite dimensional configuration space, self-occlusion, and complex dynamics of fabrics. There has been significant prior work on learning policies for specific deformable manipulation…
Manipulation skills involving contact and friction are inherent to many robotics tasks. Using the class of motor primitives for peg-in-hole like insertions, we study how robots can learn such skills. Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMP) are a…
We consider the problem of grasping deformable objects with soft shells using a robotic gripper. Such objects have a center-of-mass that changes dynamically and are fragile so prone to burst. Thus, it is difficult for robots to generate…
Developing robot controllers capable of achieving dexterous nonprehensile manipulation, such as pushing an object on a table, is challenging. The underactuated and hybrid-dynamics nature of the problem, further complicated by the…
Humans have impressive generalization capabilities when it comes to manipulating objects and tools in completely novel environments. These capabilities are, at least partially, a result of humans having internal models of their bodies and…
Decomposing knowledge into interchangeable pieces promises a generalization advantage when there are changes in distribution. A learning agent interacting with its environment is likely to be faced with situations requiring novel…
We introduce a method for learning the dynamics of complex nonlinear systems based on deep generative models over temporal segments of states and actions. Unlike dynamics models that operate over individual discrete timesteps, we learn the…
Learning an accurate model of the environment is essential for model-based control tasks. Existing methods in robotic visuomotor control usually learn from data with heavily labelled actions, object entities or locations, which can be…
Object handover is a basic, but essential capability for robots interacting with humans in many applications, e.g., caring for the elderly and assisting workers in manufacturing workshops. It appears deceptively simple, as humans perform…
This paper discusses learning a structured feedback control to obtain sufficient robustness to exogenous inputs for linear dynamic systems with unknown state matrix. The structural constraint on the controller is necessary for many…
This paper comprehensively surveys research trends in imitation learning for contact-rich robotic tasks. Contact-rich tasks, which require complex physical interactions with the environment, represent a central challenge in robotics due to…
In this work, we aim to enable legged robots to learn how to interpret human social cues and produce appropriate behaviors through physical human guidance. However, learning through physical engagement can place a heavy burden on users when…
Contact-based decision and planning methods are becoming increasingly important to endow higher levels of autonomy for legged robots. Formal synthesis methods derived from symbolic systems have great potential for reasoning about high-level…
In this exploratory paper we introduce the problem of cognitive agents that learn how to modify their environment according to local sensing to reach a global goal. We concentrate on discrete dynamics (cellular automata) on a…
Common methods for learning robot dynamics assume motion is continuous, causing unrealistic model predictions for systems undergoing discontinuous impact and stiction behavior. In this work, we resolve this conflict with a smooth, implicit…
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…
Controlling a robot based on physics-consistent dynamic models, such as Deep Lagrangian Networks (DeLaN), can improve the generalizability and interpretability of the resulting behavior. However, in complex environments, the number of…
Robotic manipulation behavior should be robust to disturbances that violate high-level task-structure. Such robustness can be achieved by constantly monitoring the environment to observe the discrete high-level state of the task. This is…
One of the most basic skills a robot should possess is predicting the effect of physical interactions with objects in the environment. This enables optimal action selection to reach a certain goal state. Traditionally, dynamics are…