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To learn manipulation skills, robots need to understand the features of those skills. An easy way for robots to learn is through Learning from Demonstration (LfD), where the robot learns a skill from an expert demonstrator. While the main…

Recent neural network architectures have claimed to explain data from the human visual cortex. Their demonstrated performance is however still limited by the dependence on exploiting low-level features for solving visual tasks. This…

In recent years deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems have attained superhuman performance in a number of challenging task domains. However, a major limitation of such applications is their demand for massive amounts of training data. A…

Mobile manipulation tasks remain one of the critical challenges for the widespread adoption of autonomous robots in both service and industrial scenarios. While planning approaches are good at generating feasible whole-body robot…

Due to burdensome data requirements, learning from demonstration often falls short of its promise to allow users to quickly and naturally program robots. Demonstrations are inherently ambiguous and incomplete, making correct generalization…

Deep reinforcement learning has proven to be a great success in allowing agents to learn complex tasks. However, its application to actual robots can be prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, the unpredictability of human behavior in…

Amidst the wide popularity of imitation learning algorithms in robotics, their properties regarding hyperparameter sensitivity, ease of training, data efficiency, and performance have not been well-studied in high-precision…

We describe an algorithm for motion planning based on expert demonstrations of a skill. In order to teach robots to perform complex object manipulation tasks that can generalize robustly to new environments, we must (1) learn a…

Methods for teaching motion skills to robots focus on training for a single skill at a time. Robots capable of learning from demonstration can considerably benefit from the added ability to learn new movement skills without forgetting what…

Robotic manipulation requires accurate motion and physical interaction control. However, current robot learning approaches focus on motion-centric action spaces that do not explicitly give the policy control over the interaction. In this…

Robot learning is at an inflection point, driven by rapid advancements in machine learning and the growing availability of large-scale robotics data. This shift from classical, model-based methods to data-driven, learning-based paradigms is…

Humans can leverage physical interaction to teach robot arms. This physical interaction takes multiple forms depending on the task, the user, and what the robot has learned so far. State-of-the-art approaches focus on learning from a single…

With their unique combination of characteristics - an energy density almost 100 times that of human muscle, and a power density of 5.3 kW/kg, similar to a jet engine's output - Nylon artificial muscles stand out as particularly apt for…

As environments involving both robots and humans become increasingly common, so does the need to account for people during planning. To plan effectively, robots must be able to respond to and sometimes influence what humans do. This…

Human beings are considered as the most intelligent species on Earth. The ability to think, to create, to innovate, are the key elements which make humans superior over other existing species on Earth. Machines lack all those elements,…

Robust and efficient learning remains a challenging problem in robotics, in particular with complex visual inputs. Inspired by human attention mechanism, with which we quickly process complex visual scenes and react to changes in the…

Despite a slow neuromuscular system, humans easily outperform modern robot technology, especially in physical contact tasks. How is this possible? Biological evidence indicates that motor control of biological systems is achieved by a…

Learning from demonstration allows for rapid deployment of robot manipulators to a great many tasks, by relying on a person showing the robot what to do rather than programming it. While this approach provides many opportunities, measuring,…

With the increase in complexity of robotic systems and the rise in non-expert users, it can be assumed that task constraints are not explicitly known. In tasks where avoiding singularity is critical to its success, this paper provides an…

Learning skills by imitation is a promising concept for the intuitive teaching of robots. A common way to learn such skills is to learn a parametric model by maximizing the likelihood given the demonstrations. Yet, human demonstrations are…