The paper formalizes robot environments using topological concepts.
problem Determining indistinguishable environments for robots.
method Formalizing robot systems as topological dynamical systems, using covering maps and bisimulation.
result Covering maps can witness indistinguishability of environments under general conditions.
Prototype real-world RL environment for robotics training.
problem Lack of common real-world RL benchmark.
method Developed OffWorld Gym with open access to real-world robotics environments.
result Baseline results in navigation task on real and simulated terrain.
This research introduces an autonomous robot navigation method using reinforcement learning.
problem Improving robot navigation in complex environments.
method Deep Q Network (DQN) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) models for path planning and decision-making.
result The models enhance robot navigation ability and adaptive learning in unknown environments.
Building models, or maps, of robot environments is a highly active research area; however, most existing techniques construct unstructured maps and assume static environments. In this paper, we present an algorithm for learning object models of non-stationary objects found in office-type environments. Our algorithm exp…
A new framework for robot block-stacking tasks using causal probabilistic models.
problem Robots fail outside controlled environments due to uncertainty and lack of explicit design for all scenarios.
method Causal probabilistic framework combining causal models and probabilistic representations of noise.
result Robots can perceive, reason about, and explain their environment for block-stacking tasks.
New sensor placement affects robot controller learnability.
problem Catastrophic forgetting in neural controllers for robots.
method Demonstrated how sensor placement alters loss function manifolds.
result Sensor placement can reduce or induce catastrophic forgetting.
ORRB enables fast, customizable rendering of robotics environments.
problem Fast and customizable rendering of robotics environments.
method Based on Unity3d and MuJoCo, optimized for cloud deployment.
result Visual domain randomization for improved simulation.
Top 8 robotic vision systems tackled lifelong object recognition challenges.
problem Lifelong learning in robotic vision for varied, dynamic environments.
method Design of a dataset with diverse conditions and rules for evaluation.
result Robotic vision systems improved over time with dynamic object appearances.
Robot solves Rubik's cube using simulation-trained models.
problem Solving Rubik's cube with a robot hand.
method Automatic domain randomization (ADR) and a custom robot platform.
result Control policies and vision state estimators trained with ADR exhibit improved sim2real transfer.
Robots learn to navigate rough terrain using reinforcement learning.
problem Generalizing robot behavior to new, unseen rough terrains.
method PPMC RL Training Algorithm
result Robots achieve 100% success rate in learning new rough terrain maps.
The design of robotic systems is largely dictated by our purely human intuition about how we perceive the world. This intuition has been proven incorrect with regard to a number of critical issues, such as visual change blindness. In order to develop truly autonomous robots, we must step away from this intuition and le…
New approach for obstacle avoidance in robotics using learned representations.
problem Challenges in sensor-based motion planning for new and dynamic environments.
method Proposes a new obstacle representation using PointNet architecture trained jointly with policies for obstacle avoidance.
result Significant improvements in accuracy and efficiency compared to state of the art.
New method learns robot actions from videos without explicit labels.
problem Training robots to perform tasks from few demonstrations.
method Uses images and text for task-agnostic and general representation, synthesizes hallucinated actions, and applies dense correspondences.
result Trains robot policies solely from RGB videos, achieving diverse tasks across different robots and environments.
Robot learns multiple tasks hierarchically by transferring knowledge.
problem Learning multiple complex tasks in open-ended environments.
method Task-oriented procedures, goal-babbling, imitation learning, active learning, intrinsic motivation.
result Robots can learn complex tasks more efficiently by transferring knowledge from simpler ones.
STM maps improve terrain perception for autonomous robots.
problem Perception of terrain for autonomous robots in general environments.
method Stochastic triangular mesh (STM) technique for 2.5-D surface mapping.
result STM maps are more accurate than standard elevation maps.
Robo-PlaNet learns robot tasks faster than PlaNet.
problem Training robot tasks with limited or noisy sensor data.
method Asynchronous version of PlaNet that interleaves dynamics model training and data collection.
result Robo-PlaNet achieves higher performance in less time.
Robots learn to handle complex tasks creatively using DRL.
problem Robotic manipulation challenges and intelligence.
method Designing challenging manipulation tasks, applying DRL for robot training.
result Robots exhibit creative and non-intuitive problem-solving.
Self-supervised policy adapts after deployment without rewards.
problem Generalizing reinforcement learning policies across different environments.
method Uses self-supervision to train policies in new environments without reward signals.
result Significant improvements in generalization across diverse environments.
Deep RL improves robot navigation in images.
problem Applying deep RL to visual navigation in realistic environments.
method Extended A2C algorithm with auxiliary tasks for segmentation, depth prediction, and target prediction.
result Method outperforms state-of-the-art visual navigation methods.
State representation learning aims at learning compact representations from raw observations in robotics and control applications. Approaches used for this objective are auto-encoders, learning forward models, inverse dynamics or learning using generic priors on the state characteristics. However, the diversity in appl…
Predicting movement of objects while the action of learning agent interacts with the dynamics of the scene still remains a key challenge in robotics. We propose a multi-layer Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) autoendocer network that predicts future frames for a robot navigating in a dynamic environment with moving obstacl…
Learning to control robots directly based on images is a primary challenge in robotics. However, many existing reinforcement learning approaches require iteratively obtaining millions of robot samples to learn a policy, which can take significant time. In this paper, we focus on learning a realistic world model capturi…
TIDBD adapts step sizes online for better robotic predictions.
problem Choosing appropriate learning parameters for online prediction-learning.
method Temporal-Difference Incremental Delta-Bar-Delta (TIDBD) for step-size adaptation.
result TIDBD performs comparably to classic TD learning and detects sensor failures.
The paper proposes a method to learn from both simulation and real-world data.
problem Training autonomous systems in simulation and applying them to real-world environments.
method Balancing samples from simulation and real-world data using a replay buffer.
result The method achieves better performance in real-world tasks compared to training only in simulation.
This thesis tackles learning reward functions from human comparative feedback.
problem Designing reward functions for complex tasks is challenging and humans often provide suboptimal demonstrations.
method Proposes learning reward functions from comparative feedback (pairwise comparisons, best-of-many choices, rankings, scaled comparisons) and active learning techniques.
result Demonstrates the effectiveness of learning reward functions from comparative feedback in various domains.
Survey examines challenges and solutions in sim-to-real transfer for robotics.
problem Challenges in transferring robotic systems from simulation to real-world environments.
method Leveraging techniques like domain randomization, real-to-sim transfer, state and action abstractions, and sim-real co-training.
result Promising results in closing the reality gap across various robotic domains.
CausalWorld benchmarks robotic manipulation tasks with causal structure for transfer learning.
problem Challenges in transferring learned skills to new robotic manipulation environments.
method Proposes a simulation-based benchmark with a combinatorial family of tasks.
result Demonstrates the feasibility of tasks in the benchmark and provides baseline results.
Learning algorithms are enabling robots to solve increasingly challenging real-world tasks. These approaches often rely on demonstrations and reproduce the behavior shown. Unexpected changes in the environment may require using different behaviors to achieve the same effect, for instance to reach and grasp an object in…
Robotic systems are ever more capable of automation and fulfilment of complex tasks, particularly with reliance on recent advances in intelligent systems, deep learning and artificial intelligence. However, as robots and humans come closer in their interactions, the matter of interpretability, or explainability of robo…
We address the problem of bootstrapping language acquisition for an artificial system similarly to what is observed in experiments with human infants. Our method works by associating meanings to words in manipulation tasks, as a robot interacts with objects and listens to verbal descriptions of the interactions. The mo…
Q2-Opt improves robot grasping success and efficiency.
problem Improving robot grasping success and efficiency in vision-based tasks.
method Quantile QT-Opt, a distributional variant of Q-learning for continuous domains.
result Q2-Opt achieves superior grasping success and is more sample efficient.
Paper presents a method for efficient robot adaptation using fine-tuning.
problem Continuous adaptation of robot learning systems in real-world scenarios.
method Fine-tuning previously learned policies using off-policy reinforcement learning.
result Fine-tuning leads to substantial performance gains and adaptation to new conditions.
Study detects anomalies in robot vision data to predict hazards.
problem Detecting unexpected hazards in robot exploration data.
method Anomaly detection using autoencoders at different scales.
result Autoencoders improve anomaly detection performance on diverse robot scenarios.
Modular method predicts motion in crowded scenes using learned environment models.
problem Predicting motion in dynamic, crowded environments.
method Modular model of spatial and dynamic aspects, unsupervised adaptation to new tasks.
result Comparable performance to state-of-the-art, transferable across tasks.
A new method for robot manipulation tasks using imagined object goals.
problem Learning robot manipulation in sparse reward environments.
method Train objects to reach target positions, then use predictions to create a curriculum of tasks.
result Higher success rates in challenging learning scenarios compared to alternatives.
Paper introduces timing-based adversarial attacks on DRL-based navigation systems.
problem Vulnerability of DRL-based navigation systems to adversarial attacks.
method Timing-based adversarial strategies using physical noise patterns.
result Adversarial timing attacks significantly degrade DRL-based navigation performance.
Improved robot navigation using multi-head attention for natural language instructions.
problem Improving robot navigation in unfamiliar environments.
method Proposes a multi-head attention mechanism blending layer in a neural network model.
result Significant performance gains in translating instructions for unseen environments.
Robotic weed control has seen increased research of late with its potential for boosting productivity in agriculture. Majority of works focus on developing robotics for croplands, ignoring the weed management problems facing rangeland stock farmers. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to widespread uptake of robotic weed con…
Computer simulation provides an automatic and safe way for training robotic control policies to achieve complex tasks such as locomotion. However, a policy trained in simulation usually does not transfer directly to the real hardware due to the differences between the two environments. Transfer learning using domain ra…
Sensorimotor contingency theory offers a promising account of the nature of perception, a topic rarely addressed in the robotics community. We propose a developmental framework to address the problem of the autonomous acquisition of sensorimotor contingencies by a naive robot. While exploring the world, the robot inter…
Mobile robot navigation in complex and dynamic environments is a challenging but important problem. Reinforcement learning approaches fail to solve these tasks efficiently due to reward sparsities, temporal complexities and high-dimensionality of sensorimotor spaces which are inherent in such problems. We present a nov…
New algorithms allow multiple robots to search efficiently without central coordination.
problem Efficiently locating targets in an unknown environment with multiple robots.
method SPATS and LATSI algorithms for asynchronous multi-agent active search.
result Multiple robots can independently make data-collection decisions without a central coordinator.
MANGA transfers policies across environments with varying dynamics and noise.
problem Transferring policies across multiple environments with different dynamics and motor noise.
method Decouples policy learning from system identification, trains dynamics-conditioned policies, and learns dynamics parameters from rollouts.
result Demonstrates effective transfer of learned policies across four MuJoCo agents using agnostic RL and imitation learning methods.
Successful human-robot cooperation hinges on each agent's ability to process and exchange information about the shared environment and the task at hand. Human communication is primarily based on symbolic abstractions of object properties, rather than precise quantitative measures. A comprehensive robotic framework thus…
Automates decision-making for human operators managing multiple robots.
problem Limited human operator attention when controlling multiple robots.
method Learned model of user preferences from easy settings to automatically identify the most critical robot.
result Automated decision-making can assist human operators in managing more robots than their attention allows.
New method learns state embeddings from demonstrations for improved reinforcement learning.
problem Difficult relationship between observed state and useful policy actions in dynamic problems.
method Variational framework for learning state embeddings that optimize trajectory linearity.
result Learning embedding spaces improves policy gradient reinforcement learning performance.
This paper surveys imitation learning methods and challenges.
problem Difficulty in programming AI systems in complex environments.
method Learning from expert demonstrations to adapt behaviors.
result Overview of recent advances and emerging areas in IL.
RL controls small soccer robots in a real league, beating human-designed policies.
problem Training robots to play complex, real-world sports.
method Sim-to-Real RL approach, training in simulated environment, applying to real-world robots.
result Robots learned policies to compete effectively, beating human-designed strategies.