Related papers: Understandable Controller Extraction from Video Ob…

Autonomous robots combine a variety of skills to form increasingly complex behaviors called missions. While the skills are often programmed at a relatively low level of abstraction, their coordination is architecturally separated and often…

Navigating networked robot swarms often requires knowing where to go, sensing the environment, and path-planning based on the destination and barriers in the environment. Such a process is computationally intensive. Moreover, as the network…

Collective animal behaviors are paradigmatic examples of fully decentralized operations involving complex collective computations such as collective turns in flocks of birds or collective harvesting by ants. These systems offer a unique…

Learning stabilizing controllers from data is an important task in engineering applications; however, collecting informative data is challenging because unstable systems often lead to rapidly growing or erratic trajectories. In this work,…

Swarm Intelligence (SI) is the property of a system whereby the collective behaviors of (unsophisticated) entities interacting locally with their environment cause coherent functional global patterns to emerge. SI provides a basis with…

Understanding collective behavior and how it evolves is important to ensure that robot swarms can be trusted in a shared environment. One way to understand the behavior of the swarm is through collective behavior reconstruction using prior…

Swarm based optimization algorithms have demonstrated remarkable success in solving complex optimization problems. However, their widespread adoption remains sceptical due to limited transparency in how different algorithmic components…

Articulation perception aims to recover the motion and structure of articulated objects (e.g., drawers and cupboards), and is fundamental to 3D scene understanding in robotics, simulation, and animation. Existing learning-based methods rely…

We tackle the problem of learning complex, general behaviors directly in the real world. We propose an approach for robots to efficiently learn manipulation skills using only a handful of real-world interaction trajectories from many…

Robotic swarms are decentralized multi-robot systems whose members use local information from proximal neighbors to execute simple reactive control laws that result in emergent collective behaviors. In contrast, members of a general…

Building trust in reinforcement learning (RL) agents requires understanding why they make certain decisions, especially in high-stakes applications like robotics, healthcare, and finance. Existing explainability methods often focus on…

In this paper, we introduce Hebbian learning as a novel method for swarm robotics, enabling the automatic emergence of heterogeneity. Hebbian learning presents a biologically inspired form of neural adaptation that solely relies on local…

Sociability is essential for modern robots to increase their acceptability in human environments. Traditional techniques use manually engineered utility functions inspired by observing pedestrian behaviors to achieve social navigation.…

Bio-hybrid systems---close couplings of natural organisms with technology---are high potential and still underexplored. In existing work, robots have mostly influenced group behaviors of animals. We explore the possibilities of mixing…

We study the limits of linear modeling of swarm behavior by characterizing the inflection point beyond which linear models of swarm collective behavior break down. The problem we consider is a central place object gathering task. We design…

In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of using knowledge graphs to interpret actions and behaviors for robot manipulation control. Equipped with an uncalibrated visual servoing controller, we propose to use robot knowledge graphs to…

Robot controllers are often optimised for a single robot in a single environment. This approach proves brittle, as such a controller will often fail to produce sensible behavior for a new morphology or environment. In comparison, animal…

In complex systems, we often observe complex global behavior emerge from a collection of agents interacting with each other in their environment, with each individual agent acting only on locally available information, without knowing the…

Neurobiological theories of spatial cognition developed with respect to recording data from relatively small and/or simplistic environments compared to animals' natural habitats. It has been unclear how to extend theoretical models to large…

In this paper, we present a reinforcement learning approach to designing a control policy for a "leader" agent that herds a swarm of "follower" agents, via repulsive interactions, as quickly as possible to a target probability distribution…