Related papers: Training Robots to Evaluate Robots: Example-Based …
Many manipulation tasks require robots to interact with unknown environments. In such applications, the ability to adapt the impedance according to different task phases and environment constraints is crucial for safety and performance.…
Learning from Demonstrations (LfD) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) have enabled robot agents to accomplish complex tasks. Reward Machines (RMs) enhance RL's capability to train policies over extended time horizons by structuring high-level…
Evaluating learned robot control policies to determine their physical task-level capabilities costs experimenter time and effort. The growing number of policies and tasks exacerbates this issue. It is impractical to test every policy on…
When robots enter everyday human environments, they need to understand their tasks and how they should perform those tasks. To encode these, reward functions, which specify the objective of a robot, are employed. However, designing reward…
Reward function design and exploration time are arguably the biggest obstacles to the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world. In many real-world tasks, designing a reward function takes considerable hand…
The ability to learn and refine behavior after deployment has become ever more important for robots as we design them to operate in unstructured environments like households. In this work, we design a new learning system based on large…
When a person is not satisfied with how a robot performs a task, they can intervene to correct it. Reward learning methods enable the robot to adapt its reward function online based on such human input, but they rely on handcrafted…
With the increasing presence of robots in our every-day environments, improving their social skills is of utmost importance. Nonetheless, social robotics still faces many challenges. One bottleneck is that robotic behaviors need to be often…
Enabling bipedal walking robots to learn how to maneuver over highly uneven, dynamically changing terrains is challenging due to the complexity of robot dynamics and interacted environments. Recent advancements in learning from…
This article surveys reinforcement learning approaches in social robotics. Reinforcement learning is a framework for decision-making problems in which an agent interacts through trial-and-error with its environment to discover an optimal…
Reward learning enables robots to learn adaptable behaviors from human input. Traditional methods model the reward as a linear function of hand-crafted features, but that requires specifying all the relevant features a priori, which is…
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…
We present a novel method for collaborative robots (cobots) to learn manipulation tasks and perform them in a human-like manner. Our method falls under the learn-from-observation (LfO) paradigm, where robots learn to perform tasks by…
Active learning from demonstration allows a robot to query a human for specific types of input to achieve efficient learning. Existing work has explored a variety of active query strategies; however, to our knowledge, none of these…
The use of robotics in controlled environments has flourished over the last several decades and training robots to perform tasks using control strategies developed from dynamical models of their hardware have proven very effective. However,…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated significant potential for generalist robotic policies; however, they struggle to generalize to long-horizon complex tasks in novel real-world domains due to distribution shifts and the…
Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) ap proaches often struggle to learn effective policies under sparse reward conditions, necessitating the manual design of complex, task-specific reward functions. To address this limitation, rein…
Robot assistants for older adults and people with disabilities need to interact with their users in collaborative tasks. The core component of these systems is an interaction manager whose job is to observe and assess the task, and infer…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) infers a reward function from demonstrations, allowing for policy improvement and generalization. However, despite much recent interest in IRL, little work has been done to understand the minimum set of…
Demonstrations are widely used in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for facilitating solving tasks with sparse rewards. However, the tasks in real-world scenarios can often have varied initial conditions from the demonstration, which would…