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Equipping quadruped robots with manipulators provides unique loco-manipulation capabilities, enabling diverse practical applications. This integration creates a more complex system that has increased difficulties in modeling and control.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Dianyong Hou , Chengrui Zhu , Zhen Zhang , Zhibin Li , Chuang Guo , Yong Liu

A key challenge in contact-rich dexterous manipulation is the need to jointly reason over geometry, kinematic constraints, and intricate, nonsmooth contact dynamics. End-to-end visuomotor policies bypass this structure, but often require…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Zhixian Xie , Yu Xiang , Michael Posa , Wanxin Jin

Controlling contact forces during interactions is critical for locomotion and manipulation tasks. While sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) has succeeded in many contact-rich problems, current RL methods achieve forceful interactions…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Tifanny Portela , Gabriel B. Margolis , Yandong Ji , Pulkit Agrawal

Contact-rich manipulation demands human-like integration of perception and force feedback: vision should guide task progress, while high-frequency interaction control must stabilize contact under uncertainty. Existing learning-based…

Generalizing locomotion policies across diverse legged robots with varying morphologies is a key challenge due to differences in observation/action dimensions and system dynamics. In this work, we propose Multi-Loco, a novel unified…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Shunpeng Yang , Zhen Fu , Zhefeng Cao , Guo Junde , Patrick Wensing , Wei Zhang , Hua Chen

Autonomous learning of object manipulation skills can enable robots to acquire rich behavioral repertoires that scale to the variety of objects found in the real world. However, current motion skill learning methods typically restrict the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2015-02-27 Sergey Levine , Nolan Wagener , Pieter Abbeel

In real-world human-robot systems, it is essential for a robot to comprehend human objectives and respond accordingly while performing an extended series of motor actions. Although human objective alignment has recently emerged as a…

Linear temporal logic (LTL) is a compelling framework for specifying complex, structured tasks for reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Recent work has shown that interpreting LTL instructions as finite automata, which can be seen as…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Mattia Giuri , Mathias Jackermeier , Alessandro Abate

Learning from real-world robot demonstrations holds promise for interacting with complex real-world environments. However, the complexity and variability of interaction dynamics often cause purely positional controllers to struggle with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Lai Wei , Xuanbin Peng , Ri-Zhao Qiu , Tianshu Huang , Xuxin Cheng , Xiaolong Wang

Cross-robot policy learning -- training a single policy to perform well across multiple embodiments -- remains a central challenge in robot learning. Transformer-based policies, such as vision-language-action (VLA) models, are typically…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Kei Suzuki , Jing Liu , Ye Wang , Chiori Hori , Matthew Brand , Diego Romeres , Toshiaki Koike-Akino

Modular robots can be rearranged into a new design, perhaps each day, to handle a wide variety of tasks by forming a customized robot for each new task. However, reconfiguring just the mechanism is not sufficient: each design also requires…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Julian Whitman , Matthew Travers , Howie Choset

A longstanding goal in character animation is to combine data-driven specification of behavior with a system that can execute a similar behavior in a physical simulation, thus enabling realistic responses to perturbations and environmental…

Graphics · Computer Science 2018-08-07 Xue Bin Peng , Pieter Abbeel , Sergey Levine , Michiel van de Panne

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-24 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained popularity in task planning for long-horizon manipulation tasks. To enhance the validity of LLM-generated plans, visual demonstrations and online videos have been widely employed to guide the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Kejia Chen , Zheng Shen , Yue Zhang , Lingyun Chen , Fan Wu , Zhenshan Bing , Sami Haddadin , Alois Knoll

Loco-manipulation planning skills are pivotal for expanding the utility of robots in everyday environments. These skills can be assessed based on a system's ability to coordinate complex holistic movements and multiple contact interactions…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Jean-Pierre Sleiman , Farbod Farshidian , Marco Hutter

Developing robot controllers capable of achieving dexterous nonprehensile manipulation, such as pushing an object on a table, is challenging. The underactuated and hybrid-dynamics nature of the problem, further complicated by the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-08-07 Juan Del Aguila Ferrandis , João Moura , Sethu Vijayakumar

In many applications, multi-robot systems are required to achieve multiple objectives. For these multi-objective tasks, it is oftentimes hard to design a single control policy that fulfills all the objectives simultaneously. In this paper,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-09-04 Anqi Li , Mustafa Mukadam , Magnus Egerstedt , Byron Boots

We present a unified model-based and data-driven approach for quadrupedal planning and control to achieve dynamic locomotion over uneven terrain. We utilize on-board proprioceptive and exteroceptive feedback to map sensory information and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-13 Siddhant Gangapurwala , Mathieu Geisert , Romeo Orsolino , Maurice Fallon , Ioannis Havoutis

Building robotic agents capable of operating across diverse environments and object types remains a significant challenge, often requiring extensive data collection. This is particularly restrictive in robotics, where each data point must…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Siddhant Haldar , Lerrel Pinto

In human environments, robots are expected to accomplish a variety of manipulation tasks given simple natural language instructions. Yet, robotic manipulation is extremely challenging as it requires fine-grained motor control, long-term…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Pierre-Louis Guhur , Shizhe Chen , Ricardo Garcia , Makarand Tapaswi , Ivan Laptev , Cordelia Schmid