Related papers: Complex Locomotion Skill Learning via Differentiab…
Dynamic control of a soft-body robot to deliver complex behaviors with low-dimensional actuation inputs is challenging. In this paper, we present a computational approach to automatically generate versatile, underactuated control policies…
A longstanding goal in character animation is to combine data-driven specification of behavior with a system that can execute a similar behavior in a physical simulation, thus enabling realistic responses to perturbations and environmental…
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…
Physical learning is an emerging paradigm in science and engineering whereby (meta)materials acquire desired macroscopic behaviors by exposure to examples. So far, it has been applied to static properties such as elastic moduli and…
An important field in robotics is the optimization of controllers. Currently, robots are often treated as a black box in this optimization process, which is the reason why derivative-free optimization methods such as evolutionary algorithms…
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…
Quadrupedal robots resemble the physical ability of legged animals to walk through unstructured terrains. However, designing a controller for quadrupedal robots poses a significant challenge due to their functional complexity and requires…
In typical artificial neural networks, neurons adjust according to global calculations of a central processor, but in the brain neurons and synapses self-adjust based on local information. Contrastive learning algorithms have recently been…
The impressive lifelong learning in animal brains is primarily enabled by plastic changes in synaptic connectivity. Importantly, these changes are not passive, but are actively controlled by neuromodulation, which is itself under the…
Modern Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms promise to solve difficult motor control problems directly from raw sensory inputs. Their attraction is due in part to the fact that they can represent a general class of methods that allow to…
Particle robots are novel biologically-inspired robotic systems where locomotion can be achieved collectively and robustly, but not independently. While its control is currently limited to a hand-crafted policy for basic locomotion tasks,…
Learning natural and diverse behaviors from human motion datasets remains challenging in physics-based character control. Existing conditional adversarial models often suffer from tight and biased embedding distributions where embeddings…
Safe learning of locomotion skills is still an open problem. Indeed, the intrinsically unstable nature of the open-loop dynamics of locomotion systems renders naive learning from scratch prone to catastrophic failures in the real world. In…
Object manipulation is a basic element in everyday human lives. Robotic manipulation has progressed from maneuvering single-rigid-body objects with firm grasping to maneuvering soft objects and handling contact-rich actions. Meanwhile,…
Autonomous wheeled-legged robots have the potential to transform logistics systems, improving operational efficiency and adaptability in urban environments. Navigating urban environments, however, poses unique challenges for robots,…
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,…
Musculoskeletal models have been widely used for detailed biomechanical analysis to characterise various functional impairments given their ability to estimate movement variables (i.e., muscle forces and joint moment) which cannot be…
Learning robot tasks or controllers using deep reinforcement learning has been proven effective in simulations. Learning in simulation has several advantages. For example, one can fully control the simulated environment, including halting…
Legged robots must exhibit robust and agile locomotion across diverse, unstructured terrains, a challenge exacerbated under blind locomotion settings where terrain information is unavailable. This work introduces a hierarchical…
Learning complex trajectories from demonstrations in robotic tasks has been effectively addressed through the utilization of Dynamical Systems (DS). State-of-the-art DS learning methods ensure stability of the generated trajectories;…