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Related papers: Rapidly Learning Soft Robot Control via Implicit T…

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Robots must make and break contact with the environment to perform useful tasks, but planning and control through contact remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we achieve real-time contact-implicit model predictive control with a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Vince Kurtz , Alejandro Castro , Aykut Özgün Önol , Hai Lin

This paper proposes a new control framework for manipulating soft objects. A Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach is used to make the shape of a deformable object reach a set of desired points by controlling a robotic arm which…

Diffusion policies have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for visuomotor control in robotic manipulation due to their ability to model the distribution of action sequences and capture multimodality. However, iterative denoising leads…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jinhao Li , Yuxuan Cong , Yingqiao Wang , Hao Xia , Shan Huang , Yijia Zhang , Ningyi Xu , Guohao Dai

Training a deep network policy for robot manipulation is notoriously costly and time consuming as it depends on collecting a significant amount of real world data. To work well in the real world, the policy needs to see many instances of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-06-24 Xinchen Yan , Mohi Khansari , Jasmine Hsu , Yuanzheng Gong , Yunfei Bai , Sören Pirk , Honglak Lee

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has demonstrated remarkable performance in many continuous control tasks. However, a significant obstacle to the real-world application of DRL is the lack of safety guarantees. Although DRL agents can…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Weiye Zhao , Feihan Li , Changliu Liu

Learning visuomotor policies in simulation is much safer and cheaper than in the real world. However, due to discrepancies between the simulated and real data, simulator-trained policies often fail when transferred to real robots. One…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-31 Ricardo Garcia , Robin Strudel , Shizhe Chen , Etienne Arlaud , Ivan Laptev , Cordelia Schmid

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has proven a powerful technique in many sequential decision making domains. However, Robotics poses many challenges for RL, most notably training on a physical system can be expensive and dangerous, which…

Robotics · Computer Science 2017-10-19 Lerrel Pinto , Marcin Andrychowicz , Peter Welinder , Wojciech Zaremba , Pieter Abbeel

Collecting and automatically obtaining reward signals from real robotic visual data for the purposes of training reinforcement learning algorithms can be quite challenging and time-consuming. Methods for utilizing unlabeled data can have a…

Robotic cutting of soft materials is critical for applications such as food processing, household automation, and surgical manipulation. As in other areas of robotics, simulators can facilitate controller verification, policy learning, and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Eric Heiden , Miles Macklin , Yashraj Narang , Dieter Fox , Animesh Garg , Fabio Ramos

Assistive robotic systems have shown growing potential to improve the quality of life of those with disabilities. As researchers explore the automation of various caregiving tasks, considerations for how the technology can still preserve…

Soft robots are well suited for contact-rich tasks due to their compliance, yet this property makes accurate and tractable modeling challenging. Planning motions with dynamically-feasible trajectories requires models that capture arbitrary…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Beibei Liu , Akua K. Dickson , Ran Jing , Andrew P. Sabelhaus

In this paper, we study integrated estimation and control of soft robots. A significant challenge in deploying closed loop controllers is reliable proprioception via integrated sensing in soft robots. Despite the considerable advances…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Lasitha Weerakoon , Zepeng Ye , Rahul Subramonian Bama , Elisabeth Smela , Miao Yu , Nikhil Chopra

Robotic automation is a key driver for the advancement of technology. The skills of human workers, however, are difficult to program and seem currently unmatched by technical systems. In this work we present a data-driven approach to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-06 Stefan Scherzinger , Arne Roennau , Rüdiger Dillmann

Diffusion policies (DP) have recently shown great promise for generating actions in robotic manipulation. However, existing approaches often rely on global instructions to produce short-term control signals, which can result in misalignment…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Zhihao Gu , Ming Yang , Difan Zou , Dong Xu

Soft robots manufactured with flexible materials can be highly compliant and adaptive to their surroundings, which facilitates their application in areas such as dexterous manipulation and environmental exploration. This paper aims at…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-01 Renjie Ma , Ziyao Qu , Zhijian Hu , Dong Zhao , Marios M. Polycarpou

Dexterous robotic hands have the capability to interact with a wide variety of household objects to perform tasks like grasping. However, learning robust real world grasping policies for arbitrary objects has proven challenging due to the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-26 Zoey Qiuyu Chen , Karl Van Wyk , Yu-Wei Chao , Wei Yang , Arsalan Mousavian , Abhishek Gupta , Dieter Fox

Magnetic soft robots have attracted growing interest due to their unique advantages in terms of untethered actuation and excellent controllability. However, finding the required magnetization patterns or magnetic fields to achieve the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Jianpeng Yao , Quanliang Cao , Yuwei Ju , Yuxuan Sun , Ruiqi Liu , Xiaotao Han , Liang Li

It is desired to equip robots with the capability of interacting with various soft materials as they are ubiquitous in the real world. While physics simulations are one of the predominant methods for data collection and robot training,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-11-20 Chunru Lin , Jugang Fan , Yian Wang , Zeyuan Yang , Zhehuan Chen , Lixing Fang , Tsun-Hsuan Wang , Zhou Xian , Chuang Gan

In this paper, we discuss a framework for teaching bimanual manipulation tasks by imitation. To this end, we present a system and algorithms for learning compliant and contact-rich robot behavior from human demonstrations. The presented…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Simon Stepputtis , Maryam Bandari , Stefan Schaal , Heni Ben Amor

We present a robotic setup for real-world testing and evaluation of human-robot and human-human collaborative learning. Leveraging the sample-efficiency of the Soft Actor-Critic algorithm, we have implemented a robotic platform able to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-12-05 Jonas Tjomsland , Ali Shafti , A. Aldo Faisal