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Self-assessment rules play an essential role in safe and effective real-world robotic applications, which verify the feasibility of the selected action before actual execution. But how to utilize the self-assessment results to re-choose…

While quadruped robots usually have good stability and load capacity, bipedal robots offer a higher level of flexibility / adaptability to different tasks and environments. A multi-modal legged robot can take the best of both worlds. In…

A practical approach to robot reinforcement learning is to first collect a large batch of real or simulated robot interaction data, using some data collection policy, and then learn from this data to perform various tasks, using offline…

A key challenge towards the goal of multi-part assembly tasks is finding robust sensorimotor control methods in the presence of uncertainty. In contrast to previous works that rely on a priori knowledge on whether two parts match, we aim to…

Learning a control policy for a multi-phase, long-horizon task, such as basketball maneuvers, remains challenging for reinforcement learning approaches due to the need for seamless policy composition and transitions between skills. A…

Mammals can generate autonomous behaviors in various complex environments through the coordination and interaction of activities at different levels of their central nervous system. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical learning…

Building autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) with optimized efficiency and adaptive capabilities-able to respond to changing task demands and dynamic environments-is a strongly desired goal for advancing construction robotics. Such robots can…

Legged robots have significant potential to operate in highly unstructured environments. The design of locomotion control is, however, still challenging. Currently, controllers must be either manually designed for specific robots and tasks,…

Legged robots pose one of the greatest challenges in robotics. Dynamic and agile maneuvers of animals cannot be imitated by existing methods that are crafted by humans. A compelling alternative is reinforcement learning, which requires…

Robotic assembly planning enables architects to explicitly account for the assembly process during the design phase, and enables efficient building methods that profit from the robots' different capabilities. Previous work has addressed…

Designing control policies for legged locomotion is complex due to the under-actuated and non-continuous robot dynamics. Model-free reinforcement learning provides promising tools to tackle this challenge. However, a major bottleneck of…

If a robot masters folding a kitchen towel, we would expect it to master folding a large beach towel. However, existing policy learning methods that rely on data augmentation still don't guarantee such generalization. Our insight is to add…

Manipulating deformable objects, such as fabric, is a long standing problem in robotics, with state estimation and control posing a significant challenge for traditional methods. In this paper, we show that it is possible to learn fabric…

Automation in construction has the potential to expand the technological landscape of labor intensive tasks, and bring gains in efficiency and productivity to sustain global competitiveness. In this paper we propose a task-level approach…

We present the first free-floating autonomous underwater construction system capable of using active ballasting to transport cement building blocks efficiently. It is the first free-floating autonomous construction robot to use a paired set…

We propose a learning-based navigation system for reaching visually indicated goals and demonstrate this system on a real mobile robot platform. Learning provides an appealing alternative to conventional methods for robotic navigation:…

Learning-based methods have improved locomotion skills of quadruped robots through deep reinforcement learning. However, the sim-to-real gap and low sample efficiency still limit the skill transfer. To address this issue, we propose an…

Creating a vision pipeline for different datasets to solve a computer vision task is a complex and time consuming process. Currently, these pipelines are developed with the help of domain experts. Moreover, there is no systematic structure…

For robotic vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently in pedestrian-rich environments, it is important to model subtle human behaviors and navigation rules (e.g., passing on the right). However, while instinctive to humans, socially…

Robots operating in human environments must be able to rearrange objects into semantically-meaningful configurations, even if these objects are previously unseen. In this work, we focus on the problem of building physically-valid structures…