Related papers: Autonomous Robotic Arm Manipulation for Planetary …
Robotic agents that operate autonomously in the real world need to continuously explore their environment and learn from the data collected, with minimal human supervision. While it is possible to build agents that can learn in such a…
Imitation learning for mobile manipulation is a key challenge in the field of robotic manipulation. However, current mobile manipulation frameworks typically decouple navigation and manipulation, executing manipulation only after reaching a…
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…
We propose a causal reasoning framework for creative robot tool use where a suitable tool for a task is correctly identified for use beyond its primary objectives. The proposed framework first discovers the causal relationships between the…
When humans perform a task with an articulated object, they interact with the object only in a handful of ways, while the space of all possible interactions is nearly endless. This is because humans have prior knowledge about what…
Realistic manipulation tasks require a robot to interact with an environment with a prolonged sequence of motor actions. While deep reinforcement learning methods have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for automating manipulation…
Efficiently tackling multiple tasks within complex environment, such as those found in robot manipulation, remains an ongoing challenge in robotics and an opportunity for data-driven solutions, such as reinforcement learning (RL).…
Interventions are central to causal learning and reasoning. Yet ultimately an intervention is an abstraction: an agent embedded in a physical environment (perhaps modeled as a Markov decision process) does not typically come equipped with…
In this paper, we present an autonomous navigation system for goal-driven exploration of unknown environments through deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Points of interest (POI) for possible navigation directions are obtained from the…
In the context of visual navigation, the capacity to map a novel environment is necessary for an agent to exploit its observation history in the considered place and efficiently reach known goals. This ability can be associated with spatial…
We explore the problem of estimating the mass distribution of an articulated object by an interactive robotic agent. Our method predicts the mass distribution of an object by using the limited sensing and actuating capabilities of a robotic…
Assistive robot arms can help humans by partially automating their desired tasks. Consider an adult with motor impairments controlling an assistive robot arm to eat dinner. The robot can reduce the number of human inputs -- and how precise…
We describe an algorithm for motion planning based on expert demonstrations of a skill. In order to teach robots to perform complex object manipulation tasks that can generalize robustly to new environments, we must (1) learn a…
Learning efficiently a causal model of the environment is a key challenge of model-based RL agents operating in POMDPs. We consider here a scenario where the learning agent has the ability to collect online experiences through direct…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents have shown remarkable performances in various environments, where they can discover effective policies directly from sensory inputs. However, these agents often exploit spurious correlations in the…
Active learning agents typically employ a query selection algorithm which solely considers the agent's learning objectives. However, this may be insufficient in more realistic human domains. This work uses imitation learning to enable an…
Deploying robots in human-shared environments requires a deep understanding of how nearby agents and objects interact. Employing causal inference to model cause-and-effect relationships facilitates the prediction of human behaviours and…
While current autonomous navigation systems allow robots to successfully drive themselves from one point to another in specific environments, they typically require extensive manual parameter re-tuning by human robotics experts in order to…
Machine learning techniques have enabled robots to learn narrow, yet complex tasks and also perform broad, yet simple skills with a wide variety of objects. However, learning a model that can both perform complex tasks and generalize to…
Robots operating in an open world will encounter novel objects with unknown physical properties, such as mass, friction, or size. These robots will need to sense these properties through interaction prior to performing downstream tasks with…