Related papers: CURE: Simulation-Augmented Auto-Tuning in Robotics
For many applications of pulsed radiation, the time-history of the radiation intensity must be optimized to induce a desired time-history of conditions. This optimization is normally performed using multi-physics simulations of the system.…
Calibrating robots into their workspaces is crucial for manipulation tasks. Existing calibration techniques often rely on sensors external to the robot (cameras, laser scanners, etc.) or specialized tools. This reliance complicates the…
Modular robotics research has long been preoccupied with perfecting the modules themselves -- their actuation methods, connectors, controls, communication, and fabrication. This inward focus results, in part, from the complexity of the task…
Constructing first-principles models is usually a challenging and time-consuming task due to the complexity of the real-life processes. On the other hand, data-driven modeling, and in particular neural network models often suffer from…
Modern machine learning algorithms are increasingly computationally demanding, requiring specialized hardware and distributed computation to achieve high performance in a reasonable time frame. Many hyperparameter search algorithms have…
The performance of a guidance, navigation and control (GNC) system of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) heavily depends on the correct tuning of its parameters. Our objective is to automatically tune these parameters with respect to…
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…
In order to fully exploit the advantages inherent to cooperating heterogeneous multi-robot teams, sophisticated coordination algorithms are essential. Time-extended multi-robot task allocation approaches assign and schedule a set of tasks…
Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) bring the excitement of research into the classroom to improve learning and the sense of belonging in the field. They can reach more students, earlier in their studies, than typical…
Data-efficiency is crucial for autonomous robots to adapt to new tasks and environments. In this work we focus on robotics problems with a budget of only 10-20 trials. This is a very challenging setting even for data-efficient approaches…
Algorithms typically come with tunable parameters that have a considerable impact on the computational resources they consume. Too often, practitioners must hand-tune the parameters, a tedious and error-prone task. A recent line of research…
Can we allow humans to pick among different, yet reasonably similar, decisions? Are we able to construct optimization problems whose outcome are sets of feasible, close-to-optimal decisions for human users to pick from, instead of a single,…
We introduce a unified framework for contextual and causal Bayesian optimisation, which aims to design intervention policies maximising the expectation of a target variable. Our approach leverages both observed contextual information and…
The performance, reliability, cost, size and energy usage of computing systems can be improved by one or more orders of magnitude by the systematic use of modern control and optimization methods. Computing systems rely on the use of…
Max-cut, clustering, and many other partitioning problems that are of significant importance to machine learning and other scientific fields are NP-hard, a reality that has motivated researchers to develop a wealth of approximation…
As researchers teach robots to perform more and more complex tasks, the need for realistic simulation environments is growing. Existing techniques for closing the reality gap by approximating real-world physics often require extensive real…
Tuning control policies manually to meet high-level objectives is often time-consuming. Bayesian optimization provides a data-efficient framework for automating this process using numerical evaluations of an objective function. However,…
Controller tuning is a labor-intensive process that requires human intervention and expert knowledge. Bayesian optimization has been applied successfully in different fields to automate this process. However, when tuning on hardware, such…
We enable efficient and effective coordination in unpredictable environments, i.e., in environments whose future evolution is unknown a priori and even adversarial. We are motivated by the future of autonomy that involves multiple robots…
The unit selection problem aims to find objects, called units, that optimize a causal objective function which describes the objects' behavior in a causal context (e.g., selecting customers who are about to churn but would most likely…