Related papers: Convergent Functions, Divergent Forms
Control policy learning for modular robot locomotion has previously been limited to proprioceptive feedback and flat terrain. This paper develops policies for modular systems with vision traversing more challenging environments. These…
We propose FreeMusco, a motion-free framework that jointly learns latent representations and control policies for musculoskeletal characters. By leveraging the musculoskeletal model as a strong prior, our method enables energy-aware and…
Learning locomotion skills is a challenging problem. To generate realistic and smooth locomotion, existing methods use motion capture, finite state machines or morphology-specific knowledge to guide the motion generation algorithms. Deep…
Sampling-based motion planners have experienced much success due to their ability to efficiently and evenly explore the state space. However, for many tasks, it may be more efficient to not uniformly explore the state space, especially when…
We present a novel approach for robust manipulation of high-DOF deformable objects such as cloth. Our approach uses a random forest-based controller that maps the observed visual features of the cloth to an optimal control action of the…
We present Lark, a biologically inspired decision-making framework that couples LLM-driven reasoning with an evolutionary, stakeholder-aware Multi-Agent System (MAS). To address verbosity and stakeholder trade-offs, we integrate four…
In nature, animals with exceptional locomotion abilities, such as cougars, often possess asymmetric fore and hind legs. This observation inspired us: could optimizing the leg length of quadruped robots endow them with similar locomotive…
Evolution and development operate at different timescales; generations for the one, a lifetime for the other. These two processes, the basis of much of life on earth, interact in many non-trivial ways, but their temporal hierarchy --…
Inspired by the necessity of morphological adaptation in animals, a growing body of work has attempted to expand robot training to encompass physical aspects of a robot's design. However, reinforcement learning methods capable of optimizing…
The interplay between Machine Learning (ML) and Constrained Optimization (CO) has recently been the subject of increasing interest, leading to a new and prolific research area covering (e.g.) Decision Focused Learning and Constrained…
Designing effective control policies for autonomous systems remains a fundamental challenge, traditionally addressed through reinforcement learning or manual engineering. While reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable success, it…
Learned locomotion policies can rapidly adapt to diverse environments similar to those experienced during training but lack a mechanism for fast tuning when they fail in an out-of-distribution test environment. This necessitates a slow and…
Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…
Policy gradient methods have shown success in learning control policies for high-dimensional dynamical systems. Their biggest downside is the amount of exploration they require before yielding high-performing policies. In a lifelong…
End-to-end robot manipulation policies offer significant potential for enabling embodied agents to understand and interact with the world. Unlike traditional modular pipelines, end-to-end learning mitigates key limitations such as…
Supervised operator learning is an emerging machine learning paradigm with applications to modeling the evolution of spatio-temporal dynamical systems and approximating general black-box relationships between functional data. We propose a…
Precise shape control of Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs) is crucial in robotic applications such as industrial and medical fields. However, existing methods face challenges in handling complex large deformation tasks, especially those…
Soft deployable structures - unlike conventional piecewise rigid deployables based on hinges and springs - can assume intricate 3-D shapes, thereby enabling transformative technologies in soft robotics, shape-morphing architecture, and…
Inspired by biological swarms, robotic swarms are envisioned to solve real-world problems that are difficult for individual agents. Biological swarms can achieve collective intelligence based on local interactions and simple rules; however,…
Evolution and learning have historically been interrelated topics, and their interplay is attracting increased interest lately. The emerging new factor in this trend is morphological evolution, the evolution of physical forms within…