Related papers: An Real-Sim-Real (RSR) Loop Framework for Generali…

Due to limited resources and public safety concerns, deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents for many cyber-physical systems (e.g., autonomous vehicles) are first trained in simulators. However, when deployed in real world environments,…

The sim-to-real gap, particularly in the inaccurate modeling of contact-rich dynamics like collisions, remains a primary obstacle to deploying robot policies trained in simulation. Conventional physics engines often trade accuracy for…

Current end-to-end deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches require jointly learning perception, decision-making and low-level control from very sparse reward signals and high-dimensional inputs, with little capability of incorporating…

Sim-to-real transfer is a powerful paradigm for robotic reinforcement learning. The ability to train policies in simulation enables safe exploration and large-scale data collection quickly at low cost. However, prior works in sim-to-real…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are typically sample-inefficient, making it challenging to train and deploy RL-policies in real world robots. Even a robust policy trained in simulation requires a real-world deployment to assess their…

Sim-to-real, a term that describes where a model is trained in a simulator then transferred to the real world, is a technique that enables faster deep reinforcement learning (DRL) training. However, differences between the simulator and the…

Quadruped mobile manipulators offer strong potential for agile loco-manipulation but remain difficult to control and transfer reliably from simulation to reality. Reinforcement learning (RL) shows promise for whole-body control, yet most…

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has shown remarkable success in robotics when a fast and accurate simulator is available for a given task. When using RL and simulation, more simulator realism is generally beneficial but becomes…

Robotic cutting, or milling, plays a significant role in applications such as disassembly, decommissioning, and demolition. Planning and control of cutting in real-world scenarios in uncertain environments is a complex task, with the…

Autonomous contact-based micromanipulation is challenging because surface and interfacial interactions at the microscale are difficult to model accurately, limiting the use of conventional model-based control and sim-to-real learning. We…

In this paper, we deal with the reality gap from a novel perspective, targeting transferring Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) policies learned in simulated environments to the real-world domain for visual control tasks. Instead of adopting…

Robotic assembly is a longstanding challenge, requiring contact-rich interaction and high precision and accuracy. Many applications also require adaptivity to diverse parts, poses, and environments, as well as low cycle times. In other…

Teams of people coordinate to perform complex tasks by forming abstract mental models of world and agent dynamics. The use of abstract models contrasts with much recent work in robot learning that uses a high-fidelity simulator and…

Achieving generalized in-hand object rotation remains a significant challenge in robotics, largely due to the difficulty of transferring policies from simulation to the real world. The complex, contact-rich dynamics of dexterous…

The manual design of soft robots and their controllers is notoriously challenging, but it could be augmented---or, in some cases, entirely replaced---by automated design tools. Machine learning algorithms can automatically propose, test,…

Training robots for operation in the real world is a complex, time consuming and potentially expensive task. Despite significant success of reinforcement learning in games and simulations, research in real robot applications has not been…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in real-world decision-making across diverse domains, including gaming, robotics, online advertising, public health, and natural language processing. Despite these advances, a…

Cotraining with demonstration data generated both in simulation and on real hardware has emerged as a promising recipe for scaling imitation learning in robotics. This work seeks to elucidate basic principles of this sim-and-real cotraining…

Zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of tasks with complex dynamics is a highly challenging and unsolved problem. A number of solutions have been proposed in recent years, but we have found that many works do not present a thorough evaluation in…

Sim-and-real training is a promising alternative to sim-to-real training for robot manipulations. However, the current sim-and-real training is neither efficient, i.e., slow convergence to the optimal policy, nor effective, i.e., sizeable…