Related papers: Poke and Strike: Learning Task-Informed Exploratio…

In this work we propose an approach to learn a robust policy for solving the pivoting task. Recently, several model-free continuous control algorithms were shown to learn successful policies without prior knowledge of the dynamics of the…

Enabling autonomous robots to interact in unstructured environments with dynamic objects requires manipulation capabilities that can deal with clutter, changes, and objects' variability. This paper presents a comparison of different…

Robots in many real-world settings have access to force/torque sensors in their gripper and tactile sensing is often necessary in tasks that involve contact-rich motion. In this work, we leverage surprise from mismatches in touch feedback…

Deep reinforcement learning has been shown to solve challenging tasks where large amounts of training experience is available, usually obtained online while learning the task. Robotics is a significant potential application domain for many…

Learned robot policies have consistently been shown to be versatile, but they typically have no built-in mechanism for handling the complexity of open environments, making them prone to execution failures; this implies that deploying…

Object navigation is defined as navigating to an object of a given label in a complex, unexplored environment. In its general form, this problem poses several challenges for Robotics: semantic exploration of unknown environments in search…

Non-prehensile pushing to move and reorient objects to a goal is a versatile loco-manipulation skill. In the real world, the object's physical properties and friction with the floor contain significant uncertainties, which makes the task…

Reinforcement learning algorithms have shown great success in solving different problems ranging from playing video games to robotics. However, they struggle to solve delicate robotic problems, especially those involving contact…

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is the design of exploration strategies, especially for environments with sparse reward structures and continuous state and action spaces. Intuitively, if the reinforcement signal is very scarce,…

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…

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Behavioral skills or policies for autonomous agents are conventionally learned from reward functions, via reinforcement learning, or from demonstrations, via imitation learning. However, both modes of task specification have their…

Learning complex robot behavior through interactions with the environment necessitates principled exploration. Effective strategies should prioritize exploring regions of the state-action space that maximize rewards, with optimistic…

To use robots in more unstructured environments, we have to accommodate for more complexities. Robotic systems need more awareness of the environment to adapt to uncertainty and variability. Although cameras have been predominantly used in…

Many essential manipulation tasks - such as food preparation, surgery, and craftsmanship - remain intractable for autonomous robots. These tasks are characterized not only by contact-rich, force-sensitive dynamics, but also by their…

In this work, we introduce PokeRRT, a novel motion planning algorithm that demonstrates poking as an effective non-prehensile manipulation skill to enable fast manipulation of objects and increase the size of a robot's reachable workspace.…

How can robots learn and adapt to new tasks and situations with little data? Systematic exploration and simulation are crucial tools for efficient robot learning. We present a novel black-box policy search algorithm focused on…

The ability to adapt to uncertainties, recover from failures, and coordinate between hand and fingers are essential sensorimotor skills for fully autonomous robotic grasping. In this paper, we aim to study a unified feedback control policy…

In modern industrial settings with small batch sizes it should be easy to set up a robot system for a new task. Strategies exist, e.g. the use of skills, but when it comes to handling forces and torques, these systems often fall short. We…

This paper presents a reinforcement learning framework that incorporates a Contextual Reward Machine for task-oriented grasping. The Contextual Reward Machine reduces task complexity by decomposing grasping tasks into manageable sub-tasks.…