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Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong performance in robotic control; however, state-of-the-art policy learning methods, such as actor-critic methods, still suffer from high sample complexity and often produce physically…

Soft-growing robots (i.e., vine robots) are a promising class of soft robots that allow for navigation and growth in tightly confined environments. However, these robots remain challenging to model and control due to the complex interplay…

Differentiable physics simulation provides an avenue to tackle previously intractable challenges through gradient-based optimization, thereby greatly improving the efficiency of solving robotics-related problems. To apply differentiable…

One problem with researching cognitive modeling and reinforcement learning (RL) is that researchers spend too much time on setting up an appropriate computational framework for their experiments. Many open source implementations of current…

Motion mimicking is a foundational task in physics-based character animation. However, most existing motion mimicking methods are built upon reinforcement learning (RL) and suffer from heavy reward engineering, high variance, and slow…

Reinforcement learning is applied to solve actual complex tasks from high-dimensional, sensory inputs. The last decade has developed a long list of reinforcement learning algorithms. Recent progress benefits from deep learning for raw…

Due to the complex physical properties of granular materials, research on robot learning for manipulating such materials predominantly either disregards the consideration of their physical characteristics or uses surrogate models to…

Robotic manipulation of volumetric elastoplastic deformable materials, from foods such as dough to construction materials like clay, is in its infancy, largely due to the difficulty of modelling and perception in a high-dimensional space.…

Differentiable physics has recently been shown as a powerful tool for solving soft-body manipulation tasks. However, the differentiable physics solver often gets stuck when the initial contact points of the end effectors are sub-optimal or…

We present an open-source library of natively differentiable physics and robotics environments, accompanied by gradient-based control methods and a benchmark-ing suite. The introduced environments allow auto-differentiation through the…

Accurate and efficient simulation tools are essential in robotics, enabling the visualization of system dynamics and the validation of control laws before committing resources to physical experimentation. Developing physically accurate…

Physical principles are fundamental to realistic visual simulation, but remain a significant oversight in transformer-based video generation. This gap highlights a critical limitation in rendering rigid body motion, a core tenet of…

Driven by inherent uncertainty and the sim-to-real gap, robust reinforcement learning (RL) seeks to improve resilience against the complexity and variability in agent-environment sequential interactions. Despite the existence of a large…

This paper proposes a new control framework for manipulating soft objects. A Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach is used to make the shape of a deformable object reach a set of desired points by controlling a robotic arm which…

Musculoskeletal robots provide superior advantages in flexibility and dexterity, positioning them as a promising frontier towards embodied intelligence. However, current research is largely confined to relative simple tasks, restricting the…

Effective visual representation learning is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to extract task-relevant information from raw sensory inputs and generalize across diverse environments. However, existing RL benchmarks lack the…

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been endowed with high expectations in tackling challenging manipulation tasks in an autonomous and self-directed fashion. Despite the significant strides made in the development of reinforcement…

Obtaining dynamics models is essential for robotics to achieve accurate model-based controllers and simulators for planning. The dynamics models are typically obtained using model specification of the manufacturer or simple numerical…

The sample inefficiency of reinforcement learning (RL) remains a significant challenge in robotics. RL requires large-scale simulation and can still cause long training times, slowing research and innovation. This issue is particularly…

In recent years, fully differentiable rigid body physics simulators have been developed, which can be used to simulate a wide range of robotic systems. In the context of reinforcement learning for control, these simulators theoretically…