Related papers: Leveraging Foundation Models for Enhancing Robot P…
Large language models can encode a wealth of semantic knowledge about the world. Such knowledge could be extremely useful to robots aiming to act upon high-level, temporally extended instructions expressed in natural language. However, a…
Modular robotics research has long been preoccupied with perfecting the modules themselves -- their actuation methods, connectors, controls, communication, and fabrication. This inward focus results, in part, from the complexity of the task…
Foundation models are premised on the idea that sequence prediction can uncover deeper domain understanding, much like how Kepler's predictions of planetary motion later led to the discovery of Newtonian mechanics. However, evaluating…
We present a system enabling a modular robot to autonomously build structures in order to accomplish high-level tasks. Building structures allows the robot to surmount large obstacles, expanding the set of tasks it can perform. This…
The dominant paradigm for end-to-end robot learning focuses on optimizing task-specific objectives that solve a single robotic problem such as picking up an object or reaching a target position. However, recent work on high-capacity models…
Control systems are at the core of every real-world robot. They are deployed in an ever-increasing number of applications, ranging from autonomous racing and search-and-rescue missions to industrial inspections and space exploration. To…
Vision Language Models (VLMs) play a crucial role in robotic manipulation by enabling robots to understand and interpret the visual properties of objects and their surroundings, allowing them to perform manipulation based on this multimodal…
Model-based methods are the dominant paradigm for controlling robotic systems, though their efficacy depends heavily on the accuracy of the model used. Deep neural networks have been used to learn models of robot dynamics from data, but…
Robots and intelligent systems that sense or interact with the world are increasingly being used to automate a wide array of tasks. The ability of these systems to complete these tasks depends on a large range of technologies such as the…
The next generation of autonomous agents must not only learn efficiently but also act reliably and adapt their behavior in open worlds. Standard approaches typically assume fixed tasks and environments with little or no novelty, which…
Language-conditioned robot manipulation is an emerging field aimed at enabling seamless communication and cooperation between humans and robotic agents by teaching robots to comprehend and execute instructions conveyed in natural language.…
Foundation models learn highly transferable representations through large-scale pretraining on diverse data. An increasing body of research indicates that these representations exhibit a remarkable degree of similarity across architectures…
Service robots are complex, heterogeneous, software intensive systems built from components. Recent robotics research trends mainly address isolated capabilities on functional level. Non-functional properties, such as responsiveness or…
The theoretical ability of modular robots to reconfigure in response to complex tasks in a priori unknown environments has frequently been cited as an advantage and remains a major motivator for work in the field. We present a modular robot…
Deep reinforcement learning has proven to be a great success in allowing agents to learn complex tasks. However, its application to actual robots can be prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, the unpredictability of human behavior in…
Industrial robots typically require very structured and predictable working environments, and explicit programming, in order to perform well. Therefore, expensive and time-consuming engineering work is a major obstruction when mediating…
Foundation models are rapidly transforming Earth Observation data mining by enabling generalizable and scalable solutions for key tasks such as scene classification and semantic segmentation. While most efforts in the geospatial domain have…
Mobile robots rely on maps to navigate through an environment. In the absence of any map, the robots must build the map online from partial observations as they move in the environment. Traditional methods build a map using only direct…
Through many recent successes in simulation, model-free reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising approach to solving continuous control robotic tasks. The research community is now able to reproduce, analyze and build quickly on…
Model-based planning and execution systems offer a principled approach to building flexible autonomous robots that can perform diverse tasks by automatically combining a host of basic skills. This idea is almost as old as modern robotics.…