Related papers: From Movement Primitives to Distance Fields to Dyn…
Soft robots have the potential to interact with sensitive environments and perform complex tasks effectively. However, motion plans and trajectories for soft manipulators are challenging to calculate due to their deformable nature and…
Trajectory optimization is a fundamental problem in robotics. While optimization of continuous control trajectories is well developed, many applications require both discrete and continuous, i.e., hybrid, controls. Finding an optimal…
Dynamical systems theory has long provided a foundation for understanding evolving phenomena across scientific domains. Yet, the application of this theory to complex real-world systems remains challenging due to issues in mathematical…
Often, robots are asked to execute primitive movements, whether as a single action or in a series of actions representing a larger, more complex task. These movements can be learned in many ways, but a common one is from demonstrations…
The performance of optimization-based robot motion planning algorithms is highly dependent on the initial solutions, commonly obtained by running a sampling-based planner to obtain a collision-free path. However, these methods can be slow…
A robot self-model is a task-agnostic representation of the robot's physical morphology that can be used for motion planning tasks in the absence of a classical geometric kinematic model. In particular, when the latter is hard to engineer…
Modeling dynamical systems is important in many disciplines, e.g., control, robotics, or neurotechnology. Commonly the state of these systems is not directly observed, but only available through noisy and potentially high-dimensional…
Control of robot orientation in Cartesian space implicates some difficulties, because the rotation group SO(3) is not contractible, and only globally contractible state spaces support continuous and globally asymptotically stable feedback…
Personal robots assisting humans must perform complex manipulation tasks that are typically difficult to specify in traditional motion planning pipelines, where multiple objectives must be met and the high-level context be taken into…
This paper introduces a discrete-continuous action space to learn insertion primitives for robotic assembly tasks. Primitive is a sequence of elementary actions with certain exit conditions, such as "pushing down the peg until contact".…
The field of visual representation learning has seen explosive growth in the past years, but its benefits in robotics have been surprisingly limited so far. Prior work uses generic visual representations as a basis to learn (task-specific)…
In this paper, we propose a novel framework that allows therapists to teach robot-assisted rehabilitation exercises remotely via RGB-D video. Our system encodes demonstrations as 6-DoF body-centric trajectories using Cartesian Dynamic…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) have been used to formulate many decision-making problems in science and engineering. The objective is to synthesize the best decision (action selection) policies to maximize expected rewards (or minimize…
This work proposes an optimization-based manipulation planning framework where the objectives are learned functionals of signed-distance fields that represent objects in the scene. Most manipulation planning approaches rely on analytical…
We consider the problem of using diffusion models to generate fast, smooth, and temporally consistent robot motions. Although diffusion models have demonstrated superior performance in robot learning due to their task scalability and…
We propose a method for learning dynamical systems from high-dimensional empirical data that combines variational autoencoders and (spatio-)temporal attention within a framework designed to enforce certain scientifically-motivated…
Robots must make and break contact with the environment to perform useful tasks, but planning and control through contact remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we achieve real-time contact-implicit model predictive control with a…
Learning from Demonstration (LfD) has emerged as a crucial method for robots to acquire new skills. However, when given suboptimal task trajectory demonstrations with shape characteristics reflecting human preferences but subpar dynamic…
A common theme in robot assembly is the adoption of Manipulation Primitives as the atomic motion to compose assembly strategy, typically in the form of a state machine or a graph. While this approach has shown great performance and…
We formulate grasp learning as a neural field and present Neural Grasp Distance Fields (NGDF). Here, the input is a 6D pose of a robot end effector and output is a distance to a continuous manifold of valid grasps for an object. In contrast…