Related papers: Exciting Contact Modes in Differentiable Simulatio…
High-fidelity physics simulation is essential for scalable robotic learning, but the sim-to-real gap persists, especially for tasks involving complex, dynamic, and discontinuous interactions like physical contacts. Explicit system…
Developing robot controllers in a simulated environment is advantageous but transferring the controllers to the target environment presents challenges, often referred to as the "sim-to-real gap". We present a method for continuous…
Training control policies in simulation is more appealing than on real robots directly, as it allows for exploring diverse states in an efficient manner. Yet, robot simulators inevitably exhibit disparities from the real-world…
With the maturation of differentiable physics, its role in various downstream applications: such as model predictive control, robotic design optimization, and neural PDE solvers, has become increasingly important. However, the derivative…
In this paper, we analyze the effects of contact models on contact-implicit trajectory optimization for manipulation. We consider three different approaches: (1) a contact model that is based on complementarity constraints, (2) a smooth…
Physics simulation is ubiquitous in robotics. Whether in model-based approaches (e.g., trajectory optimization), or model-free algorithms (e.g., reinforcement learning), physics simulators are a central component of modern control pipelines…
Differentiable simulators promise to improve sample efficiency in robot learning by providing analytic gradients of the system dynamics. Yet, their application to contact-rich tasks like locomotion is complicated by the inherently…
Control techniques like MPC can realize contact-rich manipulation which exploits dynamic information, maintaining friction limits and safety constraints. However, contact geometry and dynamics are required to be known. This information is…
In recent years, soft robotics simulators have evolved to offer various functionalities, including the simulation of different material types (e.g., elastic, hyper-elastic) and actuation methods (e.g., pneumatic, cable-driven, servomotor).…
Contact dynamics hold immense amounts of information that can improve a robot's ability to characterize and learn about objects in their environment through interactions. However, collecting information-rich contact data is challenging due…
This paper proposes a novel, more computationally efficient method for optimizing robot excitation trajectories for dynamic parameter identification, emphasizing self-collision avoidance. This addresses the system identification challenges…
The ability to accurately predict human behavior is central to the safety and efficiency of robot autonomy in interactive settings. Unfortunately, robots often lack access to key information on which these predictions may hinge, such as…
In this paper we address the challenge of exploration in deep reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation tasks. In sparse goal settings, an agent does not receive any positive feedback until randomly achieving the goal, which becomes…
In this paper, a novel approach is proposed for learning robot control in contact-rich tasks such as wiping, by developing Diffusion Contact Model (DCM). Previous methods of learning such tasks relied on impedance control with time-varying…
Training robotic policies in simulation suffers from the sim-to-real gap, as simulated dynamics can be different from real-world dynamics. Past works tackled this problem through domain randomization and online system-identification. The…
Contact-rich manipulation is difficult for robots to execute and requires accurate perception of the environment. In some scenarios, vision is occluded. The robot can then no longer obtain real-time scene state information through visual…
Emotion expressions serve as important communicative signals and are crucial cues in intuitive interactions between humans. Hence, it is essential to include these fundamentals in robotic behavior strategies when interacting with humans to…
Robotic manipulation stands as a largely unsolved problem despite significant advances in robotics and machine learning in recent years. One of the key challenges in manipulation is the exploration of the dynamics of the environment when…
The ability to simulate and predict the outcome of contacts is paramount to the successful execution of many robotic tasks. Simulators are powerful tools for the design of robots and their behaviors, yet the discrepancy between their…
Learning complex robot behaviors through interaction requires structured exploration. Planning should target interactions with the potential to optimize long-term performance, while only reducing uncertainty where conducive to this…