Related papers: Stylized Table Tennis Robots Skill Learning with I…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved some impressive recent successes in various computer games and simulations. Most of these successes are based on having large numbers of episodes from which the agent can learn. In typical robotic…

Dynamic tasks like table tennis are relatively easy to learn for humans but pose significant challenges to robots. Such tasks require accurate control of fast movements and precise timing in the presence of imprecise state estimation of the…

Learning to play table tennis is a challenging task for robots, as a wide variety of strokes required. Recent advances have shown that deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is able to successfully learn the optimal actions in a simulated…

The game of table tennis is renowned for its extremely high spin rate, but most table tennis robots today struggle to handle balls with such rapid spin. To address this issue, we have contributed a series of methods, including: 1.…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a method for learning decision-making tasks that could enable robots to learn and adapt to their situation on-line. For an RL algorithm to be practical for robotic control tasks, it must learn in very few…

The ball-balancing robot (ballbot) is a good platform to test the effectiveness of a balancing controller. Considering balancing control, conventional model-based feedback control methods have been widely used. However, contacts and…

Training robots with physical bodies requires developing new methods and action representations that allow the learning agents to explore the space of policies efficiently. This work studies sample-efficient learning of complex policies in…

We present a deep-dive into a real-world robotic learning system that, in previous work, was shown to be capable of hundreds of table tennis rallies with a human and has the ability to precisely return the ball to desired targets. This…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can in principle acquire complex robotic skills by learning from large amounts of data in the real world, collected via trial and error. However, most RL algorithms use a carefully engineered setup in…

Humanoid table tennis (TT) demands rapid perception, proactive whole-body motion, and agile footwork under strict timing--capabilities that remain difficult for end-to-end control policies. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) framework…

Demonstration-guided reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for learning complex behaviors by leveraging both reward feedback and a set of target task demonstrations. Prior approaches for demonstration-guided RL treat every new…

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for autonomously acquiring complex behaviors from low level sensor observations. Although a large portion of deep RL research has focused on applications in video games…

While reinforcement learning (RL) has the potential to enable robots to autonomously acquire a wide range of skills, in practice, RL usually requires manual, per-task engineering of reward functions, especially in real world settings where…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have been proven successful in solving manipulation tasks autonomously. However, RL is still not widely adopted on real robotic systems because working with real hardware entails additional challenges,…

Learning goal conditioned control in the real world is a challenging open problem in robotics. Reinforcement learning systems have the potential to learn autonomously via trial-and-error, but in practice the costs of manual reward design,…

Recent advancements in physics-based character animation leverage deep learning to generate agile and natural motion, enabling characters to execute movements such as backflips, boxing, and tennis. However, reproducing the selection and use…

Techniques based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) are increasingly being used to design control policies for robotic systems. RL fundamentally relies on state-based reward functions to encode desired behavior of the robot and bad reward…

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is inherently a reactive method, operating under the assumption that it starts with no prior knowledge of the system and entirely depends on trial-and-error for learning. This approach faces several…

We propose a model-free algorithm for learning efficient policies capable of returning table tennis balls by controlling robot joints at a rate of 100Hz. We demonstrate that evolutionary search (ES) methods acting on CNN-based policy…