Related papers: Quantifying and Visualizing Sim-to-Real Gaps: Phys…

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…

Motivation and gap: PID-family controllers remain a pragmatic choice for many robotic systems due to their simplicity and interpretability, but tuning stable, high-performing gains is time-consuming and typically non-transferable across…

Safety is a critical component of autonomous systems and remains a challenge for learning-based policies to be utilized in the real world. In particular, policies learned using reinforcement learning often fail to generalize to novel…

Varying dynamics parameters in simulation is a popular Domain Randomization (DR) approach for overcoming the reality gap in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Nevertheless, DR heavily hinges on the choice of the sampling distribution of the…

Applying end-to-end learning to solve complex, interactive, pixel-driven control tasks on a robot is an unsolved problem. Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms are too slow to achieve performance on a real robot, but their potential has…

Producing agents that can generalize to a wide range of visually different environments is a significant challenge in reinforcement learning. One method for overcoming this issue is visual domain randomization, whereby at the start of each…

In this research, we introduce a deep reinforcement learning-based control approach to address the intricate challenge of the robotic pre-grasping phase under microgravity conditions. Leveraging reinforcement learning eliminates the…

Tendon drives paired with soft muscle actuation enable faster and safer robots while potentially accelerating skill acquisition. Still, these systems are rarely used in practice due to inherent nonlinearities, friction, and hysteresis,…

In this paper, we introduce a novel architecture to connecting adaptive learning and neural networks into an arbitrary machine's control system paradigm. Two consecutive Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are used together to accurately model…

Achieving generalizable and precise robotic manipulation across diverse environments remains a critical challenge, largely due to limitations in spatial perception. While prior imitation-learning approaches have made progress, their…

Accurately modeling soft robots in simulation is computationally expensive and commonly falls short of representing the real world. This well-known discrepancy, known as the sim-to-real gap, can have several causes, such as coarsely…

Robots which make use of soft or compliant inter- actions often leverage tendon-driven actuation which enables actuators to be placed more flexibly, and compliance to be maintained. However, controlling complex tendon systems is…

This paper proposes a simple strategy for sim-to-real in Deep-Reinforcement Learning (DRL) -- called Roll-Drop -- that uses dropout during simulation to account for observation noise during deployment without explicitly modelling its…

Robotic cloth untangling requires progressively disentangling fabric by adapting pulling actions to changing contact and tension conditions. Because large-scale real-world training is impractical due to cloth damage and hardware wear,…

How to explore corner cases as efficiently and thoroughly as possible has long been one of the top concerns in the context of deep reinforcement learning (DeepRL) autonomous driving. Training with simulated data is less costly and dangerous…

The co-adaptation of robot morphology and behaviour becomes increasingly important with the advent of fast 3D-manufacturing methods and efficient deep reinforcement learning algorithms. A major challenge for the application of co-adaptation…

We present a system for training deep neural networks for object detection using synthetic images. To handle the variability in real-world data, the system relies upon the technique of domain randomization, in which the parameters of the…

Synthetic data can improve generalization when real data is scarce, but excessive reliance may introduce distributional mismatches that degrade performance. In this paper, we present a learning-theoretic framework to quantify the trade-off…

The ability to generalize to unseen domains is crucial for machine learning systems deployed in the real world, especially when we only have data from limited training domains. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective regularization…

This paper applies geometric PID control for asymptotic tracking of a desired trajectory by a hoop robot in the presence of disturbances and uncertainties. The hoop robot, consisting of a circular body rolling without slip along a…