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Challenges in traversing dynamic clutters lie mainly in the efficient perception of the environmental dynamics and the generation of evasive behaviors considering obstacle movement. Previous solutions have made progress in explicitly…
Reinforcement learning is of increasing importance in the field of robot control and simulation plays a~key role in this process. In the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, drones), there is also an increase in the number of published…
Limited power and computational resources, absence of high-end sensor equipment and GPS-denied environments are challenges faced by autonomous micro areal vehicles (MAVs). We address these challenges in the context of autonomous navigation…
This article presents a solution to intercept an agile drone by another agile drone carrying a catching net. We formulate the interception as a Competitive Reinforcement Learning problem, where the interceptor and the target drone are…
In the field of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) landing, conventional approaches fall short in delivering not only the required precision but also the resilience against environmental disturbances. Yet, learning-based algorithms…
Modular Aerial Robot Systems (MARS) comprise multiple drone units with reconfigurable connected formations, providing high adaptability to diverse mission scenarios, fault conditions, and payload capacities. However, existing control…
Humans are remarkably data-efficient when adapting to new unseen conditions, like driving a new car. In contrast, modern robotic control systems, like neural network policies trained using Reinforcement Learning (RL), are highly specialized…
The ability to converse with humans and follow natural language commands is crucial for intelligent unmanned aerial vehicles (a.k.a. drones). It can relieve people's burden of holding a controller all the time, allow multitasking, and make…
Current methods to learn controllers for autonomous vehicles (AVs) focus on behavioural cloning. Being trained only on exact historic data, the resulting agents often generalize poorly to novel scenarios. Simulators provide the opportunity…
We focus on developing efficient and reliable policy optimization strategies for robot learning with real-world data. In recent years, policy gradient methods have emerged as a promising paradigm for training control policies in simulation.…
Rigid grippers used in existing aerial manipulators require precise positioning to achieve successful grasps and transmit large contact forces that may destabilize the drone. This limits the speed during grasping and prevents "dynamic…
Sim-to-real transfer is a fundamental challenge in robot reinforcement learning. Discrepancies between simulation and reality can significantly impair policy performance, especially if it receives high-dimensional inputs such as dense depth…
Executing safe and precise flight maneuvers in dynamic high-speed winds is important for the ongoing commoditization of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, because the relationship between various wind conditions and its effect on…
The decision and planning system for autonomous driving in urban environments is hard to design. Most current methods manually design the driving policy, which can be expensive to develop and maintain at scale. Instead, with imitation…
Studies that broaden drone applications into complex tasks require a stable control framework. Recently, deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been exploited in many studies for robot control to accomplish complex tasks.…
Due to dynamic variations such as changing payload, aerodynamic disturbances, and varying platforms, a robust solution for quadrotor trajectory tracking remains challenging. To address these challenges, we present a deep reinforcement…
Collision avoidance algorithms are of central interest to many drone applications. In particular, decentralized approaches may be the key to enabling robust drone swarm solutions in cases where centralized communication becomes…
Drones are enabling new forms of cinematography. However, quadrotor cinematography requires accurate comprehension of the scene, technical skill of flying, artistic skill of composition and simultaneous realization of all the requirements…
In this paper, we deal with the reality gap from a novel perspective, targeting transferring Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policies learned in simulated environments to the real-world domain for visual control tasks. Instead of adopting…
In this work we are the first to present an offline policy gradient method for learning imitative policies for complex urban driving from a large corpus of real-world demonstrations. This is achieved by building a differentiable data-driven…