Related papers: Sim-and-Real Reinforcement Learning for Manipulati…

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents need to explore their environments in order to learn optimal policies. In many environments and tasks, safety is of critical importance. The widespread use of simulators offers a number of advantages,…

Contact-rich manipulation tasks often exhibit a large sim-to-real gap. For instance, industrial assembly tasks frequently involve tight insertions where the clearance is less than 0.1 mm and can even be negative when dealing with a…

Legged robots must achieve both robust locomotion and energy efficiency to be practical in real-world environments. Yet controllers trained in simulation often fail to transfer reliably, and most existing approaches neglect…

Simulation based learning often provides a cost-efficient recourse to reinforcement learning applications in robotics. However, simulators are generally incapable of accurately replicating real-world dynamics, and thus bridging the sim2real…

The framework of Simulation-to-real learning, i.e, learning policies in simulation and transferring those policies to the real world is one of the most promising approaches towards data-efficient learning in robotics. However, due to the…

Robotic cutting, or milling, plays a significant role in applications such as disassembly, decommissioning, and demolition. Planning and control of cutting in real-world scenarios in uncertain environments is a complex task, with the…

Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…

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…

High-fidelity physics simulation is essential for scalable robotic learning, but the sim-to-real gap persists, especially for tasks involving complex, dynamic, and discontinuous interactions like physical contacts. Explicit system…

Robot learning requires a considerable amount of high-quality data to realize the promise of generalization. However, large data sets are costly to collect in the real world. Physics simulators can cheaply generate vast data sets with broad…

Robotic manipulation with deformable objects represents a data-intensive regime in embodied learning, where shape, contact, and topology co-evolve in ways that far exceed the variability of rigids. Although simulation promises relief from…

Coverage path planning (CPP) is the problem of finding a path that covers the entire free space of a confined area, with applications ranging from robotic lawn mowing to search-and-rescue. While for known environments, offline methods can…

Intelligent agents must be able to think fast and slow to perform elaborate manipulation tasks. Reinforcement Learning (RL) has led to many promising results on a range of challenging decision-making tasks. However, in real-world robotics,…

The industrial application of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is frequently slowed down because of the inability to generate the experience required to train the models. Collecting data often involves considerable time and economic effort…

In spoken dialogue systems, we aim to deploy artificial intelligence to build automated dialogue agents that can converse with humans. A part of this effort is the policy optimisation task, which attempts to find a policy describing how to…

Applications of reinforcement learning (RL) to stabilization problems of real systems are restricted since an agent needs many experiences to learn an optimal policy and may determine dangerous actions during its exploration. If we know a…

In order perform a large variety of tasks and to achieve human-level performance in complex real-world environments, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Agents must be able to learn from their past experiences and gain both knowledge and an…

Reinforcement Learning (RL), among other learning-based methods, represents powerful tools to solve complex robotic tasks (e.g., actuation, manipulation, navigation, etc.), with the need for real-world data to train these systems as one of…

Safety is a critical component of autonomous systems and remains a challenge for learning-based policies to be utilized in the real world. In particular, policies learned using reinforcement learning often fail to generalize to novel…

Using Reinforcement Learning (RL) in simulation to construct policies useful in real life is challenging. This is often attributed to the sequential decision making aspect: inaccuracies in simulation accumulate over multiple steps, hence…