Related papers: Learning Joint Space Reference Manifold for Reliab…
Understanding the intentions of human teammates is critical for safe and effective human-robot interaction. The canonical approach for human-aware robot motion planning is to first predict the human's goal or path, and then construct a…
This thesis provides an in-depth structural analysis and efficient algorithmic solutions for tabletop object rearrangement with overhand grasps (TORO), a foundational task in advancing intelligent robotic manipulation. Rearranging multiple…
Pre-training on large datasets of robot demonstrations is a powerful technique for learning diverse manipulation skills but is often limited by the high cost and complexity of collecting robot-centric data, especially for tasks requiring…
Humanoid robots promise transformative capabilities for industrial and service applications. While recent advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) yield impressive results in locomotion, manipulation, and navigation, the proposed methods…
Assistive robots enable people with disabilities to conduct everyday tasks on their own. However, these tasks can be complex, containing both coarse reaching motions and fine-grained manipulation. For example, when eating, not only does one…
This article proposes a method for learning and robotic replication of dynamic collaborative tasks from offline videos. The objective is to extend the concept of learning from demonstration (LfD) to dynamic scenarios, benefiting from widely…
Robot assistants for older adults and people with disabilities need to interact with their users in collaborative tasks. The core component of these systems is an interaction manager whose job is to observe and assess the task, and infer…
Humanoid robots remain vulnerable to falls and unrecoverable failure states, limiting their practical utility in unstructured environments. While reinforcement learning has demonstrated stand-up behaviors, existing approaches treat recovery…
Motion planning is a mature area of research in robotics with many well-established methods based on optimization or sampling the state space, suitable for solving kinematic motion planning. However, when dynamic motions under constraints…
Nature has evolved humans to walk on different terrains by developing a detailed understanding of their physical characteristics. Similarly, legged robots need to develop their capability to walk on complex terrains with a variety of…
Massively parallel simulation has reduced reinforcement learning (RL) training time for robots from days to minutes. However, achieving fast and reliable sim-to-real RL for humanoid control remains difficult due to the challenges introduced…
Humanoid robots offer significant versatility for performing a wide range of tasks, yet their basic ability to walk and run, especially at high velocities, remains a challenge. This letter presents a novel method that combines deep…
Assistive robot manipulators must be able to autonomously pick and place a wide range of novel objects to be truly useful. However, current assistive robots lack this capability. Additionally, assistive systems need to have an interface…
Moving a human body or a large and bulky object can require the strength of whole arm manipulation (WAM). This type of manipulation places the load on the robot's arms and relies on global properties of the interaction to succeed---rather…
Robotic manipulation in everyday scenarios, especially in unstructured environments, requires skills in pose-aware object manipulation (POM), which adapts robots' grasping and handling according to an object's 6D pose. Recognizing an…
Recent breakthroughs in the reinforcement learning (RL) community have made significant advances towards learning and deploying policies on real world robotic systems. However, even with the current state-of-the-art algorithms and…
The process of learning a manipulation task depends strongly on the action space used for exploration: posed in the incorrect action space, solving a task with reinforcement learning can be drastically inefficient. Additionally, similar…
Key to rich, dexterous manipulation in the real world is the ability to coordinate control across two hands. However, while the promise afforded by bimanual robotic systems is immense, constructing control policies for dual arm autonomous…
Mastering robotic manipulation skills through reinforcement learning (RL) typically requires the design of shaped reward functions. Recent developments in this area have demonstrated that using sparse rewards, i.e. rewarding the agent only…
It is challenging for humans -- particularly those living with physical disabilities -- to control high-dimensional, dexterous robots. Prior work explores learning embedding functions that map a human's low-dimensional inputs (e.g., via a…