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Integrating robots in complex everyday environments requires a multitude of problems to be solved. One crucial feature among those is to equip robots with a mechanism for teaching them a new task in an easy and natural way. When teaching…

The market for domestic robots made to perform household chores is growing as these robots relieve people of everyday responsibilities. Domestic robots are generally welcomed for their role in easing human labor, in contrast to industrial…

Reinforcement learning (RL) depends critically on the choice of reward functions used to capture the de- sired behavior and constraints of a robot. Usually, these are handcrafted by a expert designer and represent heuristics for relatively…

We present a control method for improved repetitive path following for a ground vehicle that is geared towards long-term operation where the operating conditions can change over time and are initially unknown. We use weighted Bayesian…

Typically, loss functions, regularization mechanisms and other important aspects of training parametric models are chosen heuristically from a limited set of options. In this paper, we take the first step towards automating this process,…

Optimization problems characterized by both discrete and continuous variables are common across various disciplines, presenting unique challenges due to their complex solution landscapes and the difficulty of navigating mixed-variable…

A major challenge in the Deep RL (DRL) community is to train agents able to generalize over unseen situations, which is often approached by training them on a diversity of tasks (or environments). A powerful method to foster diversity is to…

One of the core facets of Bayesianism is in the updating of prior beliefs in light of new evidence$\text{ -- }$so how can we maintain a Bayesian approach if we have no prior beliefs in the first place? This is one of the central challenges…

Robots learning from observations in the real world using inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) may encounter objects or agents in the environment, other than the expert, that cause nuisance observations during the demonstration. These…

Skilled robotic manipulation benefits from complex synergies between non-prehensile (e.g. pushing) and prehensile (e.g. grasping) actions: pushing can help rearrange cluttered objects to make space for arms and fingers; likewise, grasping…

Many robot manipulation skills can be represented with deterministic characteristics and there exist efficient techniques for learning parameterized motor plans for those skills. However, one of the active research challenge still remains…

Robots are good at performing repetitive tasks in modern manufacturing industries. However, robot motions are mostly planned and preprogrammed with a notable lack of adaptivity to task changes. Even for slightly changed tasks, the whole…

Key challenges for the deployment of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the real world are the discovery, representation and reuse of skills in the absence of a reward function. To this end, we propose a novel approach to learn a…

Solving robotic navigation tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging due to their sparse reward and long decision horizon nature. However, in many navigation tasks, high-level (HL) task representations, like a rough floor plan,…

This thesis work presents a more efficient and effective approach to training control-related tasks for humanoid robots using Reinforcement Learning (RL). The traditional RL methods are limited in adapting to real-world environments,…

Action-conditioned robot world models generate future video frames of the manipulated scene given a robot action sequence, offering a promising alternative for simulating tasks that are difficult to model with traditional physics engines.…

Unsupervised reinforcement learning (RL) aims at pre-training agents that can solve a wide range of downstream tasks in complex environments. Despite recent advancements, existing approaches suffer from several limitations: they may require…

We propose a novel framework for Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in modular robotics using traditional robotic tools that extend state-of-the-art DRL implementations and provide an end-to-end approach which trains a robot directly from…

Articulated object manipulation is a challenging task, requiring constrained motion and adaptive control to handle the unknown dynamics of the manipulated objects. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely employed to tackle various…

We introduce ASPiRe (Adaptive Skill Prior for RL), a new approach that leverages prior experience to accelerate reinforcement learning. Unlike existing methods that learn a single skill prior from a large and diverse dataset, our framework…