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Human-robot cooperation is essential in environments such as warehouses and retail stores, where workers frequently handle deformable objects like paper, bags, and fabrics. Coordinating robotic actions with human assistance remains…

Multi-stage forceful manipulation tasks, such as twisting a nut on a bolt, require reasoning over interlocking constraints over discrete as well as continuous choices. The robot must choose a sequence of discrete actions, or strategy, such…

Grasping an object when it is in an ungraspable pose is a challenging task, such as books or other large flat objects placed horizontally on a table. Inspired by human manipulation, we address this problem by pushing the object to the edge…

Reinforcement learning requires manual specification of a reward function to learn a task. While in principle this reward function only needs to specify the task goal, in practice reinforcement learning can be very time-consuming or even…

Fine manipulation tasks, such as threading cable ties or slotting a battery, are notoriously difficult for robots because they require precision, careful coordination of contact forces, and closed-loop visual feedback. Performing these…

Wire harnesses are essential connecting components in manufacturing industry but are challenging to be automated in industrial tasks such as bin picking. They are long, flexible and tend to get entangled when randomly placed in a bin. This…

When cast into the Deep Reinforcement Learning framework, many robotics tasks require solving a long horizon and sparse reward problem, where learning algorithms struggle. In such context, Imitation Learning (IL) can be a powerful approach…

Continual lifelong learning is essential to many applications. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective approach to continual deep learning. Our approach leverages the principles of deep model compression, critical weights…

While robot learning has demonstrated promising results for enabling robots to automatically acquire new skills, a critical challenge in deploying learning-based systems is scale: acquiring enough data for the robot to effectively…

Instance segmentation with unseen objects is a challenging problem in unstructured environments. To solve this problem, we propose a robot learning approach to actively interact with novel objects and collect each object's training label…

Operant keypress tasks, where each action has a consequence, have been analogized to the construct of "wanting" and produce lawful relationships in humans that quantify preferences for approach and avoidance behavior. It is unknown if…

Many practically relevant robot grasping problems feature a target object for which all grasps are occluded, e.g., by the environment. Single-shot grasp planning invariably fails in such scenarios. Instead, it is necessary to first…

Robots must know how to be gentle when they need to interact with fragile objects, or when the robot itself is prone to wear and tear. We propose an approach that enables deep reinforcement learning to train policies that are gentle, both…

In contrast to humans and animals who naturally execute seamless motions, learning and smoothly executing sequences of actions remains a challenge in robotics. This paper introduces a novel skill-agnostic framework that learns to sequence…

Reachability computations that rely on learned or estimated models require calibration in order to uphold confidence about their guarantees. Calibration generally involves sampling scenarios inside the reachable set. However, producing…

One promising approach towards effective robot decision making in complex, long-horizon tasks is to sequence together parameterized skills. We consider a setting where a robot is initially equipped with (1) a library of parameterized…

Robot manipulation is an important part of human-robot interaction technology. However, traditional pre-programmed methods can only accomplish simple and repetitive tasks. To enable effective communication between robots and humans, and to…

Deep learning's success has been attributed to the training of large, overparameterized models on massive amounts of data. As this trend continues, model training has become prohibitively costly, requiring access to powerful computing…

Robotic systems in manufacturing applications commonly assume known object geometry and appearance. This simplifies the task for the 3D perception algorithms and allows the manipulation to be more deterministic. However, those approaches…

Learning robot manipulation through deep reinforcement learning in environments with sparse rewards is a challenging task. In this paper we address this problem by introducing a notion of imaginary object goals. For a given manipulation…