Related papers: ROBOGATE: Adaptive Failure Discovery for Safe Robo…

Learning to manipulate objects efficiently, particularly those involving sustained contact (e.g., pushing, sliding) and articulated parts (e.g., drawers, doors), presents significant challenges. Traditional methods, such as robot-centric…

Learning robot control policies from physics simulations is of great interest to the robotics community as it may render the learning process faster, cheaper, and safer by alleviating the need for expensive real-world experiments. However,…

Systematic exploration of Agent-Based Models (ABMs) is challenged by the curse of dimensionality and their inherent stochasticity. We present a multi-stage pipeline integrating the systematic design of experiments with machine learning…

Imitation learning frameworks for robotic manipulation have drawn attention in the recent development of language model grounded robotics. However, the success of the frameworks largely depends on the coverage of the demonstration cases:…

A well-designed reward is critical for effective reinforcement learning-based policy improvement. In real-world robotics, obtaining such rewards typically requires either labor-intensive human labeling or brittle, handcrafted objectives.…

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate remarkable potential for generalizable robotic manipulation. The execution of complex multi-step behaviors in VLA models can be improved by robust instruction grounding, a critical component…

Stock markets exhibit regime-dependent behavior where prediction models optimized for stable conditions often fail during volatile periods. Existing approaches typically treat all market states uniformly or require manual regime labeling,…

This paper presents a novel layered framework that integrates visual foundation models to improve robot manipulation tasks and motion planning. The framework consists of five layers: Perception, Cognition, Planning, Execution, and Learning.…

As robots are being increasingly used in close proximity to humans and objects, it is imperative that robots operate safely and efficiently under real-world conditions. Yet, the environment is seldom known perfectly. Noisy sensors and…

This paper discuss the integration of risk into a robot control framework for decommissioning applications in the nuclear industry. Our overall objective is to allow the robot to evaluate a risk associated with several methods of completing…

Collecting human demonstrations via teleoperation is a common approach for teaching robots task-specific skills. However, when only a limited number of demonstrations are available, policies are prone to entering out-of-distribution (OOD)…

Recent advances in robotic manipulation have integrated low-level robotic control into Vision-Language Models (VLMs), extending them into Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Although state-of-the-art VLAs achieve strong performance in…

We present relay policy learning, a method for imitation and reinforcement learning that can solve multi-stage, long-horizon robotic tasks. This general and universally-applicable, two-phase approach consists of an imitation learning stage…

The pre-train and fine-tune paradigm in machine learning has had dramatic success in a wide range of domains because the use of existing data or pre-trained models on the internet enables quick and easy learning of new tasks. We aim to…

Safety, reliability, and user trust are crucial in human-robot interaction (HRI) where the robots must address hazards in real-time. This study presents hazard driven low-level control strategies implemented in robot-assisted dressing (RAD)…

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can achieve state-of-the-art performance in decision-making and continuous control tasks. However, applying RL algorithms on safety-critical systems still needs to be well justified due to the…

Vision-based robot learning often relies on dense image or point-cloud inputs, which are computationally heavy and entangle irrelevant background features. Existing keypoint-based approaches can focus on manipulation-centric features and be…

Acquiring large-scale, high-fidelity robot demonstration data remains a critical bottleneck for scaling Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in dexterous manipulation. We propose a Real-Sim-Real data collection and data editing pipeline that…

Pre-trained Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models represent a major leap towards general-purpose robots, yet efficiently adapting them to novel, specific tasks in-situ remains a significant hurdle. While reinforcement learning (RL) is a…

Validating the safety of autonomous systems generally requires the use of high-fidelity simulators that adequately capture the variability of real-world scenarios. However, it is generally not feasible to exhaustively search the space of…