Related papers: COMPOSER: Scalable and Robust Modular Policies for…
Humans and animals developed a sophisticated motor control apparatus and there is much evidence that it has a modular structure. The modularity offers a range of benefits, e.g. ability to learn dissociable motion styles without interference…
The advantage of modular self-reconfigurable robot systems is their flexibility, but this advantage can only be realized if appropriate configurations (shapes) and behaviors (controlling programs) can be selected for a given task. In this…
Snake robots have the potential to maneuver through tightly packed and complex environments. One challenge in enabling them to do so is the complexity in determining how to coordinate their many degrees-of-freedom to create purposeful…
Modular robots can be rearranged into a new design, perhaps each day, to handle a wide variety of tasks by forming a customized robot for each new task. However, reconfiguring just the mechanism is not sufficient: each design also requires…
Control policy learning for modular robot locomotion has previously been limited to proprioceptive feedback and flat terrain. This paper develops policies for modular systems with vision traversing more challenging environments. These…
Modular robots can be tailored to achieve specific tasks and rearranged to achieve previously infeasible ones. The challenge is choosing an appropriate design from a large search space. In this work, we describe a framework that…
Modular and reconfigurable robotic systems have been designed to provide a customized solution for the non-repetitive tasks to be performed in a constrained environment. Customized solutions are normally extracted from task-based…
A cooperative robot swarm is a collective of computationally-limited robots that share a common goal. Each robot can only interact with a small subset of its peers, without knowing how this affects the collective utility. Recent advances in…
Reinforcement learning is typically concerned with learning control policies tailored to a particular agent. We investigate whether there exists a single global policy that can generalize to control a wide variety of agent morphologies --…
Letting robots emulate human behavior has always posed a challenge, particularly in scenarios involving multiple robots. In this paper, we presented a framework aimed at achieving multi-agent reinforcement learning for robot control in…
Although robotic manipulators are used in an ever-growing range of applications, robot manufacturers typically follow a ``one-fits-all'' philosophy, employing identical manipulators in various settings. This often leads to suboptimal…
Humans are able to perform a myriad of sophisticated tasks by drawing upon skills acquired through prior experience. For autonomous agents to have this capability, they must be able to extract reusable skills from past experience that can…
Snakes can bend their elongate bodies in various forms to traverse various environments. We understand how snakes use lateral bending to push against asperities on flat ground for propulsion, and snake robots can do so effectively. However,…
Robotic agents performing domestic chores by natural language directives are required to master the complex job of navigating environment and interacting with objects in the environments. The tasks given to the agents are often composite…
We present a novel solution to the problem of simulation-to-real transfer, which builds on recent advances in robot skill decomposition. Rather than focusing on minimizing the simulation-reality gap, we learn a set of diverse policies that…
Modular robots can be reconfigured to create a variety of designs from a small set of components. But constructing a robot's hardware on its own is not enough -- each robot needs a controller. One could create controllers for some designs…
Training general robotic policies from heterogeneous data for different tasks is a significant challenge. Existing robotic datasets vary in different modalities such as color, depth, tactile, and proprioceptive information, and collected in…
Compositional reinforcement learning is a promising approach for training policies to perform complex long-horizon tasks. Typically, a high-level task is decomposed into a sequence of subtasks and a separate policy is trained to perform…
The theoretical ability of modular robots to reconfigure in response to complex tasks in a priori unknown environments has frequently been cited as an advantage and remains a major motivator for work in the field. We present a modular robot…
Swarm robotic systems are mainly inspired by swarms of socials insects and the collective emergent behavior that arises from their cooperation at the lower lever. Despite the limited sensory ability, computational power, and communication…