Related papers: Initialization of Latent Space Coordinates via Ran…
Neural networks embed the geometric structure of a data manifold lying in a high-dimensional space into latent representations. Ideally, the distribution of the data points in the latent space should depend only on the task, the data, the…
Robots can rapidly acquire new skills from demonstrations. However, during generalisation of skills or transitioning across fundamentally different skills, it is unclear whether the robot has the necessary knowledge to perform the task.…
Motion planning framed as optimisation in structured latent spaces has recently emerged as competitive with traditional methods in terms of planning success while significantly outperforming them in terms of computational speed. However,…
Operating directly from raw high dimensional sensory inputs like images is still a challenge for robotic control. Recently, Reinforcement Learning methods have been proposed to solve specific tasks end-to-end, from pixels to torques.…
We revisit the concept of constraint embedding as a means for dealing with kinematic loop constraints during dynamics computations for rigid-body systems. Specifically, we consider the local loop constraints emerging from common actuation…
Recently developed reduced-order modeling techniques aim to approximate nonlinear dynamical systems on low-dimensional manifolds learned from data. This is an effective approach for modeling dynamics in a post-transient regime where the…
Spatial data exhibits the property that nearby points are correlated. This also holds for learnt representations across layers, but not for commonly used weight initialization methods. Our theoretical analysis quantifies the learning…
We present Model-Predictive Interaction Primitives -- a robot learning framework for assistive motion in human-machine collaboration tasks which explicitly accounts for biomechanical impact on the human musculoskeletal system. First, we…
This work investigates the ways in which deep learning methods can benefit from random projection (RP), a classic linear dimensionality reduction method. We focus on two areas where, as we have found, employing RP techniques can improve…
Despite the ubiquity of large language models (LLMs) in AI research, the question of embodiment in LLMs remains underexplored, distinguishing them from embodied systems in robotics where sensory perception directly informs physical action.…
Despite its omnipresence in robotics application, the nature of spatial knowledge and the mechanisms that underlie its emergence in autonomous agents are still poorly understood. Recent theoretical work suggests that the concept of space…
Objects rarely sit in isolation in everyday human environments. If we want robots to operate and perform tasks in our human environments, they must understand how the objects they manipulate will interact with structural elements of the…
Humans and animals have a rich and flexible understanding of the physical world, which enables them to infer the underlying dynamical trajectories of objects and events, plausible future states, and use that to plan and anticipate the…
Humans are skillful navigators: We aptly maneuver through new places, realize when we are back at a location we have seen before, and can even conceive of shortcuts that go through parts of our environments we have never visited. Current…
We present a novel, reusable and task-agnostic primitive for assessing the outcome of a force-interaction robotic skill, useful e.g.\ for applications such as quality control in industrial manufacturing. The proposed method is easily…
Neural networks transform high-dimensional data into compact, structured representations, often modeled as elements of a lower dimensional latent space. In this paper, we present an alternative interpretation of neural models as dynamical…
Training intelligent agents that can drive autonomously in various urban and highway scenarios has been a hot topic in the robotics society within the last decades. However, the diversity of driving environments in terms of road topology…
We propose a framework to learn a structured latent space to represent 4D human body motion, where each latent vector encodes a full motion of the whole 3D human shape. On one hand several data-driven skeletal animation models exist…
Learning from demonstrations is an easy and intuitive way to show examples of successful behavior to a robot. However, the fact that humans optimize or take advantage of their body and not of the robot, usually called the embodiment problem…
Modeling dynamical systems is important in many disciplines, e.g., control, robotics, or neurotechnology. Commonly the state of these systems is not directly observed, but only available through noisy and potentially high-dimensional…