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Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated significant potential for generalist robotic policies; however, they struggle to generalize to long-horizon complex tasks in novel real-world domains due to distribution shifts and the…
Imitation Learning (IL) can generate computationally efficient policies from demonstrations provided by Model Predictive Control (MPC). However, IL methods often require extensive data-collection and training efforts, limiting changes to…
Autonomous UAV inspection of confined industrial infrastructure, such as ventilation ducts, demands robust navigation policies where collisions are unacceptable. While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) offers a powerful paradigm for…
Transporting suspended payloads is challenging for autonomous aerial vehicles because the payload can cause significant and unpredictable changes to the robot's dynamics. These changes can lead to suboptimal flight performance or even…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as the potential aerial base stations (BSs) to improve terrestrial communications. However, the limited onboard energy and antenna power of a UAV restrict its communication range and transmission…
Autonomous driving has achieved significant progress in recent years, but autonomous cars are still unable to tackle high-risk situations where a potential accident is likely. In such near-accident scenarios, even a minor change in the…
Aggressive time-optimal control of quadcopters poses a significant challenge in the field of robotics. The state-of-the-art approach leverages reinforcement learning (RL) to train optimal neural policies. However, a critical hurdle is the…
Quadcopter attitude control involves two tasks: smooth attitude tracking and aggressive stabilization from arbitrary states. Although both can be formulated as tracking problems, their distinct state spaces and control strategies complicate…
In recent years, motion planning for urban self-driving cars (SDV) has become a popular problem due to its complex interaction of road components. To tackle this, many methods have relied on large-scale, human-sampled data processed through…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great success in learning complex control policies for a variety of applications in robotics. However, in most such cases, the hardware of the robot has been considered immutable, modeled as part…
In this paper we present an algorithm-hardware codesign for camera-based autonomous flight in small drones. We show that the large write-latency and write-energy for nonvolatile memory (NVM) based embedded systems makes them unsuitable for…
High altitude balloons have proved useful for ecological aerial surveys, atmospheric monitoring, and communication relays. However, due to weight and power constraints, there is a need to investigate alternate modes of propulsion to…
Quadrotors have demonstrated remarkable versatility, yet their full aerobatic potential remains largely untapped due to inherent underactuation and the complexity of aggressive maneuvers. Traditional approaches, separating trajectory…
In many practical control applications, the performance level of a closed-loop system degrades over time due to the change of plant characteristics. Thus, there is a strong need for redesigning a controller without going through the system…
The unmanned aerial manipulator system, consisting of a multirotor UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) and a manipulator, has attracted considerable interest from researchers. Nevertheless, the operation of a dual-arm manipulator poses a dynamic…
We present a system that enables an autonomous small-scale RC car to drive aggressively from visual observations using reinforcement learning (RL). Our system, FastRLAP (faster lap), trains autonomously in the real world, without human…
The capture of flying MAVs (micro aerial vehicles) has garnered increasing research attention due to its intriguing challenges and promising applications. Despite recent advancements, a key limitation of existing work is that capture…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is hugely successful due to the availability of realistic simulated environments. However, performance degradation during simulation to real-world transfer still remains a challenging problem for the…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is an attractive tool for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems, where online exploration is costly and raises safety concerns. In terrain-aware UAV relaying, agents may observe high-dimensional inputs…
Compared with model-based control and optimization methods, reinforcement learning (RL) provides a data-driven, learning-based framework to formulate and solve sequential decision-making problems. The RL framework has become promising due…