Related papers: ContactRL: Safe Reinforcement Learning based Motio…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…

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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) exhibits impressive performance when managing complicated control tasks for robots. However, its wide application to physical robots is limited by the absence of strong safety guarantees. To overcome this…

Robot assistants for older adults and people with disabilities need to interact with their users in collaborative tasks. The core component of these systems is an interaction manager whose job is to observe and assess the task, and infer…

Human-robot collaboration (HRC) requires robots to adapt their motions to human intent to ensure safe and efficient cooperation in shared spaces. Although large language models (LLMs) provide high-level reasoning for inferring human intent,…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is effective in many robotic applications, but it requires extensive exploration of the state-action space, during which behaviors can be unsafe. This significantly limits its applicability to large robots with…

When robots handle navigation tasks while avoiding collisions, they perform in crowded and complex environments not as good as in stable and homogeneous environments. This often results in a low success rate and poor efficiency. Therefore,…

The Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigm has been an essential tool for automating robotic tasks. Despite the advances in RL, it is still not widely adopted in the industry due to the need for an expensive large amount of robot interaction…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is capable of sophisticated motion planning and control for robots in uncertain environments. However, state-of-the-art deep RL approaches typically lack safety guarantees, especially when the robot and…

High-mix low-volume (HMLV) industrial assembly, common in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), requires the same precision, safety, and reliability as high-volume automation while remaining flexible to product variation and…

Direct physical interaction with robots is becoming increasingly important in flexible production scenarios, but robots without protective fences also pose a greater risk to the operator. In order to keep the risk potential low, relatively…

Autonomous vehicles hold great promise for reducing traffic fatalities and improving transportation efficiency, yet their widespread adoption hinges on embedding credible and transparent ethical reasoning into routine and emergency…

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based driver assistance systems seek to improve fuel consumption via continual improvement of powertrain control actions considering experiential data from the field. However, the need to explore diverse…

Recently, collaborative robots have begun to train humans to achieve complex tasks, and the mutual information exchange between them can lead to successful robot-human collaborations. In this paper we demonstrate the application and…

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…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms show amazing performance in recent years, but placing RL in real-world applications such as self-driven vehicles may suffer safety problems. A self-driven vehicle moving to a target position following…

Conventional feedback control methods can solve various types of robot control problems very efficiently by capturing the structure with explicit models, such as rigid body equations of motion. However, many control problems in modern…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) uses rewards to guide learning, yet reward design is typically hand-crafted using heuristics that can be difficult to tune. We propose a Control Barrier Function (CBF)-informed reward design for Multi-Agent RL…

Socially aware robot navigation, where a robot is required to optimize its trajectory to maintain comfortable and compliant spatial interactions with humans in addition to reaching its goal without collisions, is a fundamental yet…

Safety stands as the primary obstacle preventing the widespread adoption of learning-based robotic systems in our daily lives. While reinforcement learning (RL) shows promise as an effective robot learning paradigm, conventional RL…