Related papers: Learning to Brachiate via Simplified Model Imitati…
Learning how to walk is a sophisticated neurological task for most animals. In order to walk, the brain must synthesize multiple cortices, neural circuits, and diverse sensory inputs. Some animals, like humans, imitate surrounding…
Legged robots have the potential to traverse complex terrain and access confined spaces beyond the reach of traditional platforms thanks to their ability to carefully select footholds and flexibly adapt their body posture while walking.…
Moving a human body or a large and bulky object can require the strength of whole arm manipulation (WAM). This type of manipulation places the load on the robot's arms and relies on global properties of the interaction to succeed---rather…
Robotic loco-manipulation tasks often involve contact-rich interactions with the environment, requiring the joint modeling of contact force and robot position. However, recent visuomotor policies often focus solely on learning position or…
Teaching an anthropomorphic robot from human example offers the opportunity to impart humanlike qualities on its movement. In this work we present a reinforcement learning based method for teaching a real world bipedal robot to perform…
Humanoid robots can, in principle, use their legs to go almost anywhere. Developing controllers capable of traversing diverse terrains, however, remains a considerable challenge. Classical controllers are hard to generalize broadly while…
Mobile Manipulation (MM) systems are ideal candidates for taking up the role of a personal assistant in unstructured real-world environments. Among other challenges, MM requires effective coordination of the robot's embodiments for…
Humanoids operating in real-world workspaces must frequently execute task-driven, short-range movements to SE(2) target poses. To be practical, these transitions must be fast, robust, and energy efficient. While learning-based locomotion…
Robot learning is often simplified to planar manipulation due to its data consumption. Then, a common approach is to use a fully-convolutional neural network to estimate the reward of grasp primitives. In this work, we extend this approach…
Biological studies show that hummingbirds can perform extreme aerobatic maneuvers during fast escape. Given a sudden looming visual stimulus at hover, a hummingbird initiates a fast backward translation coupled with a 180-degree yaw turn,…
Although robots with flexible bodies are superior in terms of the contact and adaptability, it is difficult to control them precisely. On the other hand, human beings make use of the surrounding environments to stabilize their bodies and…
We present Bi-LAT, a novel imitation learning framework that unifies bilateral control with natural language processing to achieve precise force modulation in robotic manipulation. Bi-LAT leverages joint position, velocity, and torque data…
In this work we propose an approach to learn a robust policy for solving the pivoting task. Recently, several model-free continuous control algorithms were shown to learn successful policies without prior knowledge of the dynamics of the…
Push recovery during locomotion will facilitate the deployment of humanoid robots in human-centered environments. In this paper, we present a unified framework for walking control and push recovery for humanoid robots, leveraging the arms…
This paper presents a sampling-based planning algorithm for in-hand manipulation of a grasped object using a series of external pushes. A high-level sampling-based planning framework, in tandem with a low-level inverse contact dynamics…
In recent years, there has been growing interest in developing robots and autonomous systems that can interact with human in a more natural and intuitive way. One of the key challenges in achieving this goal is to enable these systems to…
We describe a mobile manipulation hardware and software system capable of autonomously performing complex human-level tasks in real homes, after being taught the task with a single demonstration from a person in virtual reality. This is…
Training agents to autonomously learn how to use anthropomorphic robotic hands has the potential to lead to systems capable of performing a multitude of complex manipulation tasks in unstructured and uncertain environments. In this work, we…
Autonomous manipulation in everyday tasks requires flexible action generation to handle complex, diverse real-world environments, such as objects with varying hardness and softness. Imitation Learning (IL) enables robots to learn complex…
How do humans move? Advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have produced impressive results in capturing human motion using physics-based humanoid control. However, torque-controlled humanoids fail to model key aspects of human motor…