Related papers: Prof. Robot: Differentiable Robot Rendering Withou…
Vision foundation models trained on massive amounts of visual data have shown unprecedented reasoning and planning skills in open-world settings. A key challenge in applying them to robotic tasks is the modality gap between visual data and…
In the past few years, following the differentiable programming paradigm, there has been a growing interest in computing the gradient information of physical processes (e.g., physical simulation, image rendering). However, such processes…
The objective of trajectory optimization algorithms is to achieve an optimal collision-free path between a start and goal state. In real-world scenarios where environments can be complex and non-homogeneous, a robot needs to be able to…
Reasoning about 3D scenes from their 2D image projections is one of the core problems in computer vision. Solutions to this inverse and ill-posed problem typically involve a search for models that best explain observed image data. Notably,…
Differentiable simulation is a promising toolkit for fast gradient-based policy optimization and system identification. However, existing approaches to differentiable simulation have largely tackled scenarios where obtaining smooth…
Identifying predictive world models for robots in novel environments from sparse online observations is essential for robot task planning and execution in novel environments. However, existing methods that leverage differentiable…
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…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown remarkable performance improvements on vision-related tasks such as object detection or image segmentation. Despite their success, they generally lack the understanding of 3D objects which form the…
Generating robot demonstrations through simulation is widely recognized as an effective way to scale up robot data. Previous work often trained reinforcement learning agents to generate expert policies, but this approach lacks sample…
Robot design optimization, imitation learning and system identification share a common problem which requires optimization over robot or task parameters at the same time as optimizing the robot motion. To solve these problems, we can use…
Collision detection is essential to virtually all robotics applications. However, traditional geometric collision detection methods generally require pre-existing workspace geometry representations; thus, they are unable to infer the…
Differentiable simulation enables gradients to be back-propagated through physics simulations. In this way, one can learn the dynamics and properties of a physics system by gradient-based optimization or embed the whole differentiable…
Operating effectively in novel real-world environments requires robotic systems to estimate and interact with previously unseen objects. Current state-of-the-art models address this challenge by using large amounts of training data and…
In this context, a major focus of this thesis is on unintentional collisions, where a straight goal is to eliminate injury from users and passerby's via realtime sensing and control systems. A less obvious focus is to combine collision…
Robots that navigate among pedestrians use collision avoidance algorithms to enable safe and efficient operation. Recent works present deep reinforcement learning as a framework to model the complex interactions and cooperation. However,…
Differentiable contact kinematics are essential for gradient-based methods in robotics, yet the mapping from robot state to contact distance, location, and normal becomes non-smooth in degenerate configurations of shapes with zero or…
Differentiable rendering aims to compute the derivative of the image rendering function with respect to the rendering parameters. This paper presents a novel algorithm for 6-DoF pose estimation through gradient-based optimization using a…
Many core problems in robotics can be framed as constrained optimization problems. Often on these problems, the robotic system has uncertainty, or it would be advantageous to identify multiple high quality feasible solutions. To enable…
We introduce Differentiable Neural Radiosity, a novel method of representing the solution of the differential rendering equation using a neural network. Inspired by neural radiosity techniques, we minimize the norm of the residual of the…
Differentiable simulation establishes the mathematical foundation for solving challenging inverse problems in computer graphics and robotics, such as physical system identification and inverse dynamics control. However, rigor in frictional…