Related papers: Sim2Plan: Robot Motion Planning via Message Passin…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained traction for its success in solving complex tasks for robotic applications. However, its deployment on physical robots remains challenging due to safety risks and the comparatively high costs of…

This paper addresses a new strategy called Simulation-to-Real-to-Simulation (Sim2Real2Sim) to bridge the gap between simulation and real-world, and automate a flexible object manipulation task. This strategy consists of three steps: (1)…

Sim-to-real gap has long posed a significant challenge for robot learning in simulation, preventing the deployment of learned models in the real world. Previous work has primarily focused on domain randomization and system identification to…

Visual navigation by mobile robots is classically tackled through SLAM plus optimal planning, and more recently through end-to-end training of policies implemented as deep networks. While the former are often limited to waypoint planning,…

The manual design of soft robots and their controllers is notoriously challenging, but it could be augmented---or, in some cases, entirely replaced---by automated design tools. Machine learning algorithms can automatically propose, test,…

Learning effective visuomotor policies for robots purely from data is challenging, but also appealing since a learning-based system should not require manual tuning or calibration. In the case of a robot operating in a real environment the…

Simulators are a critical component of modern robotics research. Strategies for both perception and decision making can be studied in simulation first before deployed to real world systems, saving on time and costs. Despite significant…

In robotics, gradient-free optimization algorithms (e.g. evolutionary algorithms) are often used only in simulation because they require the evaluation of many candidate solutions. Nevertheless, solutions obtained in simulation often do not…

The large demand for simulated data has made the reality gap a problem on the forefront of robotics. We propose a method to traverse the gap by tuning available simulation parameters. Through the optimisation of physics engine parameters,…

If we want to train robots in simulation before deploying them in reality, it seems natural and almost self-evident to presume that reducing the sim2real gap involves creating simulators of increasing fidelity (since reality is what it is).…

In a new type of automated parts-to-picker warehouse system - a Robotic Mobile Fulfillment System (RMFS) - robots are sent to transport pods (movable shelves) to human operators at stations to pick/put items from/to pods. There are many…

Machine learning has facilitated significant advancements across various robotics domains, including navigation, locomotion, and manipulation. Many such achievements have been driven by the extensive use of simulation as a critical tool for…

Semantic navigation is necessary to deploy mobile robots in uncontrolled environments like our homes, schools, and hospitals. Many learning-based approaches have been proposed in response to the lack of semantic understanding of the…

The use of machine learning in cyber-physical systems has attracted the interest of both industry and academia. However, no general solution has yet been found against the unpredictable behavior of neural networks and reinforcement learning…

Task and motion planning represents a powerful set of hybrid planning methods that combine reasoning over discrete task domains and continuous motion generation. Traditional reasoning necessitates task domain models and enough information…

In the context of autonomous navigation of terrestrial robots, the creation of realistic models for agent dynamics and sensing is a widespread habit in the robotics literature and in commercial applications, where they are used for model…

Does progress in simulation translate to progress on robots? If one method outperforms another in simulation, how likely is that trend to hold in reality on a robot? We examine this question for embodied PointGoal navigation, developing…

Large real-world robot datasets hold great potential to train generalist robot models, but scaling real-world human data collection is time-consuming and resource-intensive. Simulation has great potential in supplementing large-scale data,…

Teaching robots dexterous manipulation skills often requires collecting hundreds of demonstrations using wearables or teleoperation, a process that is challenging to scale. Videos of human-object interactions are easier to collect and…

We introduce real-is-sim, a new approach to integrating simulation into behavior cloning pipelines. In contrast to real-only methods, which lack the ability to safely test policies before deployment, and sim-to-real methods, which require…