Related papers: Insect-inspired modular architectures as inductive…

Inspired by biological swarms, robotic swarms are envisioned to solve real-world problems that are difficult for individual agents. Biological swarms can achieve collective intelligence based on local interactions and simple rules; however,…

Micro robotics is quickly emerging to be a promising technological solution to many medical treatments with focus on targeted drug delivery. They are effective when working in swarms whose individual control is mostly infeasible owing to…

Contemporary autopilot systems for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are far more limited in their flight envelope as compared to experienced human pilots, thereby restricting the conditions UAVs can operate in and the types of missions they…

This paper deals with distributed policy optimization in reinforcement learning, which involves a central controller and a group of learners. In particular, two typical settings encountered in several applications are considered:…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated the ability to maintain the plasticity of the policy throughout short-term training in aerial robot control. However, these policies have been shown to loss of plasticity when extended to…

This work presents a distributed algorithm for resolving cooperative multi-vehicle conflicts in highly constrained spaces. By formulating the conflict resolution problem as a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem, we can train a…

Reinforcement learning (RL) can automate a wide variety of robotic skills, but learning each new skill requires considerable real-world data collection and manual representation engineering to design policy classes or features. Using deep…

A random recurrent neural network, called a reservoir, can be used to learn robot movements conditioned on context inputs that encode task goals. The Learning is achieved by mapping the random dynamics of the reservoir modulated by context…

Inverted landing in a rapid and robust manner is a challenging feat for aerial robots, especially while depending entirely on onboard sensing and computation. In spite of this, this feat is routinely performed by biological fliers such as…

Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…

Autopilot systems are typically composed of an "inner loop" providing stability and control, while an "outer loop" is responsible for mission-level objectives, e.g. way-point navigation. Autopilot systems for UAVs are predominately…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a method for learning decision-making tasks that could enable robots to learn and adapt to their situation on-line. For an RL algorithm to be practical for robotic control tasks, it must learn in very few…

An autonomous and resilient controller is proposed for leader-follower multi-agent systems under uncertainties and cyber-physical attacks. The leader is assumed non-autonomous with a nonzero control input, which allows changing the team…

Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) is inherently a reactive method, operating under the assumption that it starts with no prior knowledge of the system and entirely depends on trial-and-error for learning. This approach faces several…

Many of the challenges facing today's reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as robustness, generalization, transfer, and computational efficiency are closely related to compression. Prior work has convincingly argued why minimizing…

Robots equipped with rich sensing modalities (e.g., RGB-D cameras) performing long-horizon tasks motivate the need for policies that are highly memory-efficient. State-of-the-art approaches for controlling robots often use memory…

In control applications there is often a compromise that needs to be made with regards to the complexity and performance of the controller and the computational resources that are available. For instance, the typical hardware platform in…

We present a modular approach for learning policies for navigation over long planning horizons from language input. Our hierarchical policy operates at multiple timescales, where the higher-level master policy proposes subgoals to be…

Advancing reinforcement learning (RL) requires tools that are flexible enough to easily prototype new methods while avoiding impractically slow experimental turnaround times. To match the first requirement, the most popular RL libraries…

Cooperative control of groups of autonomous vehicles (AVs), i.e., platoons, is a promising direction to improving the efficiency of autonomous transportation systems. In this context, distributed co-optimization of both vehicle speed and…