Related papers: Unsupervised Skill Discovery as Exploration for Le…

Enabling bipedal walking robots to learn how to maneuver over highly uneven, dynamically changing terrains is challenging due to the complexity of robot dynamics and interacted environments. Recent advancements in learning from…

Exploration in an unknown environment is the core functionality for mobile robots. Learning-based exploration methods, including convolutional neural networks, provide excellent strategies without human-designed logic for the feature…

Parkour is a grand challenge for legged locomotion that requires robots to overcome various obstacles rapidly in complex environments. Existing methods can generate either diverse but blind locomotion skills or vision-based but specialized…

Robots are expected to replace menial tasks such as housework. Some of these tasks include nonprehensile manipulation performed without grasping objects. Nonprehensile manipulation is very difficult because it requires considering the…

Human demonstration videos are a widely available data source for robot learning and an intuitive user interface for expressing desired behavior. However, directly extracting reusable robot manipulation skills from unstructured human videos…

Robotic collaborative carrying could greatly benefit human activities like warehouse and construction site management. However, coordinating the simultaneous motion of multiple robots represents a significant challenge. Existing works…

How can a reinforcement learning (RL) agent prepare to solve downstream tasks if those tasks are not known a priori? One approach is unsupervised skill discovery, a class of algorithms that learn a set of policies without access to a reward…

Safety is a crucial property of every robotic platform: any control policy should always comply with actuator limits and avoid collisions with the environment and humans. In reinforcement learning, safety is even more fundamental for…

We focus on the problem of developing energy efficient controllers for quadrupedal robots. Animals can actively switch gaits at different speeds to lower their energy consumption. In this paper, we devise a hierarchical learning framework,…

We treat the problem of autonomous acquisition of manipulation skills where problem-solving strategies are initially available only for a narrow range of situations. We propose to extend the range of solvable situations by autonomous…

Controlled execution of dynamic motions in quadrupedal robots, especially those with articulated soft bodies, presents a unique set of challenges that traditional methods struggle to address efficiently. In this study, we tackle these…

Unsupervised skill discovery in reinforcement learning aims to intrinsically motivate agents to discover diverse and useful behaviours. However, unconstrained approaches can produce unsafe, unethical, or misaligned behaviours. To mitigate…

In nature, legged animals have developed the ability to adapt to challenging terrains through perception, allowing them to plan safe body and foot trajectories in advance, which leads to safe and energy-efficient locomotion. Inspired by…

We propose an exploration method that incorporates look-ahead search over basic learnt skills and their dynamics, and use it for reinforcement learning (RL) of manipulation policies . Our skills are multi-goal policies learned in isolation…

Legged robots have the potential to traverse complex terrain and access confined spaces beyond the reach of traditional platforms thanks to their ability to carefully select footholds and flexibly adapt their body posture while walking.…

In the field of unsupervised skill discovery (USD), a major challenge is limited exploration, primarily due to substantial penalties when skills deviate from their initial trajectories. To enhance exploration, recent methodologies employ…

To increase autonomy in reinforcement learning, agents need to learn useful behaviours without reliance on manually designed reward functions. To that end, skill discovery methods have been used to learn the intrinsic options available to…

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) can enable robots to autonomously acquire complex behaviors, such as legged locomotion. However, RL in the real world is complicated by constraints on efficiency, safety, and overall training stability,…

Legged robots must exhibit robust and agile locomotion across diverse, unstructured terrains, a challenge exacerbated under blind locomotion settings where terrain information is unavailable. This work introduces a hierarchical…

The enhanced mobility brought by legged locomotion empowers quadrupedal robots to navigate through complex and unstructured environments. However, optimizing agile locomotion while accounting for the varying energy costs of traversing…