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Precise trajectory tracking for legged robots can be challenging due to their high degrees of freedom, unmodeled nonlinear dynamics, or random disturbances from the environment. A commonly adopted solution to overcome these challenges is to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Jing Cheng , Yasser G. Alqaham , Amit K. Sanyal , Zhenyu Gan

Imitation learning (IL) is a popular paradigm for training policies in robotic systems when specifying the reward function is difficult. However, despite the success of IL algorithms, they impose the somewhat unrealistic requirement that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-16 Luca Viano , Yu-Ting Huang , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Craig Innes , Subramanian Ramamoorthy , Adrian Weller

Meta reinforcement learning (Meta-RL) is an approach wherein the experience gained from solving a variety of tasks is distilled into a meta-policy. The meta-policy, when adapted over only a small (or just a single) number of steps, is able…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-28 Desik Rengarajan , Sapana Chaudhary , Jaewon Kim , Dileep Kalathil , Srinivas Shakkottai

Establishing standardized metrics for Social Robot Navigation (SRN) algorithms for assessing the quality and social compliance of robot behavior around humans is essential for SRN research. Currently, commonly used evaluation metrics lack…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Raphael Wenzel , Malte Probst

We propose a method to predict the sim-to-real transfer performance of RL policies. Our transfer metric simplifies the selection of training setups (such as algorithm, hyperparameters, randomizations) and policies in simulation, without the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-29 Lei M. Zhang , Matthias Plappert , Wojciech Zaremba

Future robots should follow human social norms in order to be useful and accepted in human society. In this paper, we leverage already existing social knowledge in human societies by capturing it in our framework through the notion of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-07 Stevan Tomic , Federico Pecora , Alessandro Saffiotti

To evaluate the design and skills of a robot or an algorithm for robotics, human-robot interaction user studies need to be performed. Classically, these studies are conducted by human experimenters, requiring considerable effort, and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Dan R. Suissa , Shikhar Kumar , Yael Edan

Apprenticeship learning crucially depends on effectively learning rewards, and hence control policies from user demonstrations. Of particular difficulty is the setting where the desired task consists of a number of sub-goals with temporal…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Aniruddh G. Puranic , Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh , Stefanos Nikolaidis

Learning robotic tasks in the real world is still highly challenging and effective practical solutions remain to be found. Traditional methods used in this area are imitation learning and reinforcement learning, but they both have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Abdalkarim Mohtasib , Gerhard Neumann , Heriberto Cuayahuitl

Robot learning is witnessing a significant increase in the size, diversity, and complexity of pre-collected datasets, mirroring trends in domains such as natural language processing and computer vision. Many robot learning methods treat…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Marius Memmel , Jacob Berg , Bingqing Chen , Abhishek Gupta , Jonathan Francis

The goal of learning from demonstrations is to learn a policy for an agent (imitator) by mimicking the behavior in the demonstrations. Prior works on learning from demonstrations assume that the demonstrations are collected by a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Zhangjie Cao , Yilun Hao , Mengxi Li , Dorsa Sadigh

This work developed a meta-learning approach that adapts the control policy on the fly to different changing conditions for robust locomotion. The proposed method constantly updates the interaction model, samples feasible sequences of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-01-20 Timothée Anne , Jack Wilkinson , Zhibin Li

In this work we propose a novel end-to-end imitation learning approach which combines natural language, vision, and motion information to produce an abstract representation of a task, which in turn is used to synthesize specific motion…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-11-27 Simon Stepputtis , Joseph Campbell , Mariano Phielipp , Chitta Baral , Heni Ben Amor

Modern robotics is gravitating toward increasingly collaborative human robot interaction. Tools such as acceleration policies can naturally support the realization of reactive, adaptive, and compliant robots. These tools require us to model…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-10-09 Daniel Kappler , Franziska Meier , Nathan Ratliff , Stefan Schaal

Learning from Demonstration is increasingly used for transferring operator manipulation skills to robots. In practice, it is important to cater for limited data and imperfect human demonstrations, as well as underlying safety constraints.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-04-03 Ya-Yen Tsai , Bo Xiao , Edward Johns , Guang-Zhong Yang

The overarching goal of this work is to efficiently enable end-users to correctly anticipate a robot's behavior in novel situations. Since a robot's behavior is often a direct result of its underlying objective function, our insight is that…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-10-19 Sandy H. Huang , David Held , Pieter Abbeel , Anca D. Dragan

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become widely adopted in robot control. Despite many successes, one major persisting problem can be very low data efficiency. One solution is interactive feedback, which has been shown to speed up RL…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Daniel Harnack , Julie Pivin-Bachler , Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero

The growing need for trustworthy machine learning has led to the blossom of interpretability research. Numerous explanation methods have been developed to serve this purpose. However, these methods are deficiently and inappropriately…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Yipei Wang , Xiaoqian Wang

Social robot navigation is an evolving research field that aims to find efficient strategies to safely navigate dynamic environments populated by humans. A critical challenge in this domain is the accurate modeling of human motion, which…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Tommaso Van Der Meer , Andrea Garulli , Antonio Giannitrapani , Renato Quartullo

Programming robots to perform complex tasks is often difficult and time consuming, requiring expert knowledge and skills in robot software and sometimes hardware. Imitation learning is a method for training robots to perform tasks by…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-30 John Bateman , Andy M. Tyrrell , Jihong Zhu