Related papers: Towards Safe Robot Foundation Models
Safety is a crucial property of every robotic platform: any control policy should always comply with actuator limits and avoid collisions with the environment and humans. In reinforcement learning, safety is even more fundamental for…
Moving in dynamic pedestrian environments is one of the important requirements for autonomous mobile robots. We present a model-based reinforcement learning approach for robots to navigate through crowded environments. The navigation policy…
The last half-decade has seen a steep rise in the number of contributions on safe learning methods for real-world robotic deployments from both the control and reinforcement learning communities. This article provides a concise but holistic…
When an autonomous robot learns how to execute actions, it is of interest to know if and when the execution policy can be generalised to variations of the learning scenarios. This can inform the robot about the necessity of additional…
Safe deployment of autonomous robots in diverse scenarios requires agents that are capable of efficiently adapting to new environments while satisfying constraints. In this work, we propose a practical and theoretically-justified approach…
Contact-rich tasks pose significant challenges for robotic systems due to inherent uncertainty, complex dynamics, and the high risk of damage during interaction. Recent advances in learning-based control have shown great potential in…
Modeling generalized robot control policies poses ongoing challenges for language-guided robot manipulation tasks. Existing methods often struggle to efficiently utilize cross-dataset resources or rely on resource-intensive vision-language…
Designing controllers that accomplish tasks while guaranteeing safety constraints remains a significant challenge. We often want an agent to perform well in a nominal task, such as environment exploration, while ensuring it can avoid unsafe…
We survey applications of pretrained foundation models in robotics. Traditional deep learning models in robotics are trained on small datasets tailored for specific tasks, which limits their adaptability across diverse applications. In…
Reinforcement Learning is a promising tool for learning complex policies even in fast-moving and object-interactive domains where human teleoperation or hard-coded policies might fail. To effectively reflect this challenging category of…
Off-policy reinforcement learning algorithms promise to be applicable in settings where only a fixed data-set (batch) of environment interactions is available and no new experience can be acquired. This property makes these algorithms…
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…
Learning robotic control policies in the real world gives rise to challenges in data efficiency, safety, and controlling the initial condition of the system. On the other hand, simulations are a useful alternative as they provide an…
An outstanding challenge for the widespread deployment of robotic systems like autonomous vehicles is ensuring safe interaction with humans without sacrificing performance. Existing safety methods often neglect the robot's ability to learn…
Safe, reliable navigation in extreme, unfamiliar terrain is required for future robotic space exploration missions. Recent generative-AI methods learn semantically aware navigation policies from large, cross-embodiment datasets, but offer…
Learning has propelled the cutting edge of performance in robotic control to new heights, allowing robots to operate with high performance in conditions that were previously unimaginable. The majority of the work, however, assumes that the…
Care-giving and assistive robotics, driven by advancements in AI, offer promising solutions to meet the growing demand for care, particularly in the context of increasing numbers of individuals requiring assistance. This creates a pressing…
Domain randomization has emerged as a fundamental technique in reinforcement learning (RL) to facilitate the transfer of policies from simulation to real-world robotic applications. Many existing domain randomization approaches have been…
When developing general purpose robots, the overarching software architecture can greatly affect the ease of accomplishing various tasks. Initial efforts to create unified robot systems in the 1990s led to hybrid architectures, emphasizing…
This thesis investigates how foundation models can be systematically leveraged to enhance robotic capabilities, enabling more effective localization, interaction, and manipulation in unstructured environments. The work is structured around…