Related papers: A Contact-Safe Reinforcement Learning Framework fo…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful method for controlling dynamic systems, but its learning mechanism can lead to unpredictable actions that undermine the safety of critical systems. Here, we propose RL with Adaptive Regularization…

Robots must know how to be gentle when they need to interact with fragile objects, or when the robot itself is prone to wear and tear. We propose an approach that enables deep reinforcement learning to train policies that are gentle, both…

Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a compelling data-driven paradigm for synthesizing controllers for complex systems when accurate physical models are unavailable; however, most existing control-oriented RL methods assume stationarity and,…

Connector insertion and many other tasks commonly found in modern manufacturing settings involve complex contact dynamics and friction. Since it is difficult to capture related physical effects with first-order modeling, traditional control…

Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to developing hard-to-engineer adaptive solutions for complex and diverse robotic tasks. However, learning with real-world robots is often unreliable and difficult, which resulted in their low…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used in autonomous driving tasks and training RL models typically involves in a multi-step process: pre-training RL models on simulators, uploading the pre-trained model to real-life robots, and…

While classic control theory offers state of the art solutions in many problem scenarios, it is often desired to improve beyond the structure of such solutions and surpass their limitations. To this end, residual policy learning (RPL)…

Precise robot manipulation is critical for fine-grained applications such as chemical and biological experiments, where even small errors (e.g., reagent spillage) can invalidate an entire task. Existing approaches often rely on…

Many robot manipulation tasks require the robot to make and break contact with objects and surfaces. The dynamics of such changing-contact robot manipulation tasks are discontinuous when contact is made or broken, and continuous elsewhere.…

In this work, motivated by recent manufacturing trends, we investigate autonomous robotic assembly. Industrial assembly tasks require contact-rich manipulation skills, which are challenging to acquire using classical control and motion…

Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…

When robots handle navigation tasks while avoiding collisions, they perform in crowded and complex environments not as good as in stable and homogeneous environments. This often results in a low success rate and poor efficiency. Therefore,…

Reinforcement learning algorithms have shown great success in solving different problems ranging from playing video games to robotics. However, they struggle to solve delicate robotic problems, especially those involving contact…

Soft robot manipulators have the potential for deployment in delicate environments to perform complex manipulation tasks. However, existing obstacle detection and avoidance methods do not consider limits on the forces that manipulators may…

What is considered safe for a robot operator during physical human-robot collaboration (HRC) is specified in corresponding HRC standards (e.g., ISO/TS 15066). The regime that allows collisions between the moving robot and the operator,…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is essentially a trial-and-error learning procedure which may cause unsafe behavior during the exploration-and-exploitation process. This hinders the application of RL to real-world control problems, especially…

In sim-to-real Reinforcement Learning (RL), a policy is trained in a simulated environment and then deployed on the physical system. The main challenge of sim-to-real RL is to overcome the reality gap - the discrepancies between the real…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is capable of sophisticated motion planning and control for robots in uncertain environments. However, state-of-the-art deep RL approaches typically lack safety guarantees, especially when the robot and…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in solving relatively complex tasks, yet the deployment of RL systems in real-world scenarios poses significant challenges related to safety and robustness. This paper aims to…

Most successes in robotic manipulation have been restricted to single-arm robots, which limits the range of solvable tasks to pick-and-place, insertion, and objects rearrangement. In contrast, dual and multi arm robot platforms unlock a…