Related papers: Diff-Transfer: Model-based Robotic Manipulation Sk…

Visuomotor imitation learning policies enable robots to efficiently acquire manipulation skills from visual demonstrations. However, as scene complexity and visual distractions increase, policies that perform well in simple settings often…

To ensure that a robot is able to accomplish an extensive range of tasks, it is necessary to achieve a flexible combination of multiple behaviors. This is because the design of task motions suited to each situation would become increasingly…

We describe a framework for changing-contact robot manipulation tasks that require the robot to make and break contacts with objects and surfaces. The discontinuous interaction dynamics of such tasks make it difficult to construct and use a…

Recent end-to-end robotic manipulation research increasingly adopts architectures inspired by large language models to enable robust manipulation. However, a critical challenge arises from severe distribution shifts between robotic action…

Human-robot cooperation is essential in environments such as warehouses and retail stores, where workers frequently handle deformable objects like paper, bags, and fabrics. Coordinating robotic actions with human assistance remains…

The goal of general-purpose robotics is to create agents that can seamlessly adapt to and operate in diverse, unstructured human environments. Imitation learning has become a key paradigm for robotic manipulation, yet collecting large-scale…

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…

Non-prehensile manipulation is challenging due to complex contact interactions between objects, the environment, and robots. Model-based approaches can efficiently generate complex trajectories of robots and objects under contact…

People can learn a wide range of tasks from their own experience, but can also learn from observing other creatures. This can accelerate acquisition of new skills even when the observed agent differs substantially from the learning agent in…

In open-ended continuous environments, robots need to learn multiple parameterised control tasks in hierarchical reinforcement learning. We hypothesise that the most complex tasks can be learned more easily by transferring knowledge from…

Achieving quadruped robot locomotion across diverse and dynamic terrains presents significant challenges, primarily due to the discrepancies between simulation environments and real-world conditions. Traditional sim-to-real transfer methods…

Learning to manipulate objects efficiently, particularly those involving sustained contact (e.g., pushing, sliding) and articulated parts (e.g., drawers, doors), presents significant challenges. Traditional methods, such as robot-centric…

Soft robots have gained increased popularity in recent years due to their adaptability and compliance. In this paper, we use a digital twin model of cable-driven soft robots to learn control parameters in simulation. In doing so, we take…

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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is well known for requiring large amounts of data in order for RL agents to learn to perform complex tasks. Recent progress in model-based RL allows agents to be much more data-efficient, as it enables them to…

Trajectory planning in autonomous driving is highly dependent on predicting the emergent behavior of other road users. Learning-based methods are currently showing impressive results in simulation-based challenges, with transformer-based…

We present a differentiable soft-body physics simulator that can be composed with neural networks as a differentiable layer. In contrast to other differentiable physics approaches that use explicit forward models to define state…

Transfer learning approaches in reinforcement learning aim to assist agents in learning their target domains by leveraging the knowledge learned from other agents that have been trained on similar source domains. For example, recent…

Deep learning models lack shift invariance, making them sensitive to input shifts that cause changes in output. While recent techniques seek to address this for images, our findings show that these approaches fail to provide…

For robots operating in the real world, it is desirable to learn reusable behaviours that can effectively be transferred and adapted to numerous tasks and scenarios. We propose an approach to learn abstract motor skills from data using a…