Related papers: Dynamic Non-Prehensile Object Transport via Model-…
In warehouse and manufacturing environments, manipulation platforms are frequently deployed at conveyor belts to perform pick and place tasks. Because objects on the conveyor belts are moving, robots have limited time to pick them up. This…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has seen remarkable success in the control of single robots. However, applying DRL to robot swarms presents significant challenges. A critical challenge is non-stationarity, which occurs when two or more…
Manipulating unseen objects is challenging without a 3D representation, as objects generally have occluded surfaces. This requires physical interaction with objects to build their internal representations. This paper presents an approach…
Deep reinforcement learning has shown promising results on an abundance of robotic tasks in simulation, including visual navigation and manipulation. Prior work generally aims to build embodied agents that solve their assigned tasks as…
Complex mechanical systems such as vehicle powertrains are inherently subject to multiple nonlinearities and uncertainties arising from parametric variations. Modeling errors are therefore unavoidable, making the transfer of control systems…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in solving various combinatorial optimization problems. However, conventional RL faces challenges when dealing with complex, real-world constraints, especially when action space feasibility is…
Real-world manipulation problems in heavy clutter require robots to reason about potential contacts with objects in the environment. We focus on pick-and-place style tasks to retrieve a target object from a shelf where some `movable'…
Mobile manipulation in dynamic environments is challenging due to movable obstacles blocking the robot's path. Traditional methods, which treat navigation and manipulation as separate tasks, often fail in such 'manipulate-to-navigate'…
Unknown dynamic load carrying is one important practical application for quadruped robots. Such a problem is non-trivial, posing three major challenges in quadruped locomotion control. First, how to model or represent the dynamics of the…
This paper addresses the problem of cooperative object transportation for multiple Underwater Vehicle Manipulator Systems (UVMSs) in a constrained workspace involving static obstacles. We propose a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC)…
In partially observable (PO) environments, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents often suffer from unsatisfactory performance, since two problems need to be tackled together: how to extract information from the raw observations to solve…
Navigating fluently around pedestrians is a necessary capability for mobile robots deployed in human environments, such as buildings and homes. While research on social navigation has focused mainly on the scalability with the number of…
Robotic manipulators are widely used in various industries for complex and repetitive tasks. However, they remain vulnerable to unexpected hardware failures. In this study, we address the challenge of enabling a robotic manipulator to…
We present placing via picking (PvP), a method to autonomously collect real-world demonstrations for a family of placing tasks in which objects must be manipulated to specific, contact-constrained locations. With PvP, we approach the…
We aim to teach robots to perform simple object manipulation tasks by watching a single video demonstration. Towards this goal, we propose an optimization approach that outputs a coarse and temporally evolving 3D scene to mimic the action…
In the backdrop of an increasingly pressing need for effective urban and highway transportation systems, this work explores the synergy between model-based and learning-based strategies to enhance traffic flow management by use of an…
Determining the optimal cost function parameters of Model Predictive Control (MPC) to optimize multiple control objectives is a challenging and time-consuming task. Multiobjective Bayesian Optimization (BO) techniques solve this problem by…
A key challenge in scaling up robot learning to many skills and environments is removing the need for human supervision, so that robots can collect their own data and improve their own performance without being limited by the cost of…
Soft robotic manipulators offer operational advantage due to their compliant and deformable structures. However, their inherently nonlinear dynamics presents substantial challenges. Traditional analytical methods often depend on simplifying…
This paper presents a Deep Reinforcement Learning based navigation approach in which we define the occupancy observations as heuristic evaluations of motion primitives, rather than using raw sensor data. Our method enables fast mapping of…