Abstract: Imagine walking along a busy sidewalk, do you track the movement of every single individual? Or do you simply group pedestrians with similar moving patterns and then track the movement of this group? Grouping is a common behavior in pedestrian navigation and it is typically inappropriate for a robot to cut through the social [...]

Abstract: Soft robotic systems typically operate through the use of soft actuators constructed from highly deformable materials or liquids. Because of their intrinsic compliance, these actuators can achieve elastic resilience and adaptability similar to their biological counterparts. One challenge with engineering these artificial muscles is the selection of soft materials and activation methods while maintaining [...]

Abstract: While learning-based semantic instance segmentation methods have achieved impressive progress, their use is limited in robotics applications due to reliance on expensive training data annotations and assumptions of single sensor modality or known object classes. We propose a novel graph-based instance segmentation approach that combines information from a 2D image sequence and a 3D [...]

Abstract: The ability for an agent to continuously learn new skills without catastrophically forgetting existing knowledge is of critical importance for the development of generally intelligent agents. Most methods devised to address this problem depend heavily on well-defined task boundaries which simplify the problem considerably. Our task-agnostic method, Self-Activating Neural Ensembles (SANE), uses a hierarchical [...]

Abstract: Learning to estimate non-rigid 3D structures from 2D imaged observations is bottle-necked by the availability of abundant 3D annotated data. Learning methods that reduce the amount of required annotation is of high practical value. In this regard, Non-Rigid Structure from Motion (NRSfM) methods offer the opportunity to infer 3D structures solely from 2D annotations. [...]

Abstract: Soft robots can be constructed with few parts and from a wide variety of materials. This makes them a potentially appealing choice for applications where there are resource constraints on system fabrication. However, soft robot dynamics are difficult to accurately model analytically, due to a multiphysics coupling between shape, forces, temperature, and history of [...]

Abstract: Safe real-time navigation is a considerable challenge because engineers often need to work with uncertain vehicle dynamics, variable external disturbances, and imperfect controllers. A common strategy used to address safety is to employ hand-defined margins for obstacle inflation. However, arbitrary static margins often fail in more dynamic scenarios, and using worst-case assumptions proves to [...]

Abstract: We propose HyperDynamics, a framework that conditions on an agent’s interactions with the environment and optionally its visual observations, and generates the parameters of neural dynamics models based on inferred properties of the dynamical system. Physical and visual properties of the environment that are not part of the low-dimensional state yet affect its temporal [...]

Abstract: There exist many choices of 3D shape representation. Some recent work has advocated for the use of Gaussian Mixture Models as a compact representation for 3D shapes and scenes. These models are typically fit to point clouds, even when the shapes were obtained as 3D meshes. Here we present a formulation for fitting Gaussian [...]

Abstract: With continuing advancement in technology, the future of planetary exploration is likely to be dominated by robotic missions. Yet rovers capable of science investigations are slow and bulky with very limited computing which prohibits demonstrating full autonomy. These rovers are also risk averse due to their huge mission cost. However there is a new [...]

Abstract: Collision avoidance for multirobot systems is a well-studied problem. Recently, control barrier functions (CBFs) have been proposed for synthesizing controllers that guarantee safety while simultaneously encouraging goal stabilization for multiple robots. However, it has been noted that reactive control synthesis methods (such as CBFs) are prone to deadlock, an equilibrium of system dynamics that [...]

Abstract: Quadrotors can achieve aggressive flight by tracking complex maneuvers and rapidly changing directions. Planning for aggressive flight with trajectory optimization could be incredibly fast, even in higher dimensions, and can account for dynamics of the quadrotor, however, only provides a locally optimal solution. On the other hand, planning with discrete graph search can handle [...]

Abstract: Exploration is one of the core challenges in reinforcement learning. A common formulation of curiosity-driven exploration uses the difference between the real future and the future predicted by a learned model. However, predicting the future is an inherently difficult task which can be ill-posed in the face of stochasticity. In this work, we introduce [...]

Abstract: We present a method to capture temporally coherent dynamic clothing deformation from a monocular RGB video input. In contrast to the existing literature, our method does not require a pre-scanned personalized mesh template, and thus can be applied to in-the-wild videos. To constrain the output to a valid deformation space, we build statistical deformation [...]

Abstract: Owing to the curse of dimensionality, numerically computing global policies to optimal control problems for complex dynamical systems quickly becomes intractable. In consequence, a number of approximation methods have been developed. However, none of the current methods can quantify by how much the resulting control underperforms the elusive globally optimal solution. We propose Policy [...]

Abstract: Various methods for solving the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem have been developed independently in machine learning and economics. In particular, the method of Maximum Causal Entropy IRL is based on the perspective of entropy maximization, while related advances in the field of economics instead assume the existence of unobserved action shocks to explain [...]

Abstract: To perform manipulation tasks in the real world, robots need to operate on objects with various shapes, sizes and without access to geometric models. It is often infeasible to train monolithic neural network policies across such large variance in object properties. Towards this generalization challenge, we propose task-axis controllers, which are defined relative to [...]

Abstract: Real-world environments, such as homes, hospitals, and restaurants, often contain many objects that a robot could possibly manipulate. However, for a given manipulation task, only a small number of objects and object properties may actually be relevant. This talk presents CREST (Causal Reasoning for Efficient Structure Transfer), our approach to learn the relevant state [...]

Abstract: A large body of research exists on grasping for objects with ideal properties like Lambertian reflectance and rigidity. On the other hand, real-world environments contain many objects for which such properties do not hold, such as transparent, specular, and deformable objects. For such objects, new approaches are required to achieve the same level of [...]

Abstract: It is not feasible to pre-program robots a priori for every possible task they may encounter in unstructured domains. Upon encountering a task that a robot can't solve, one common strategy is to teach it new skills via demonstrations. However, demonstrating a task can often be more cumbersome than performing the task directly. This [...]

Abstract: In offline reinforcement learning (RL), we attempt to learn a control policy from a fixed dataset of environment interactions. This setting has the potential benefit of allowing us to learn effective policies without needing to collect additional interactive data, which can be expensive or dangerous in real-world systems. However, traditional off-policy RL methods tend [...]

Abstract: Guide robots that help users who are blind or low vision navigate through crowds and complex environments show promise for improving accessibility in public spaces. These robots must provide real-time safety guarantees for the users, which requires accurate modeling of their behavior in the context of closely coupled human-robot motion. This model must also [...]

Abstract: In robot telemanipulation tasks, the robot itself can sometimes occlude a target object from the user's view. We investigate the potential of diminished reality to address this problem. Our method uses an optical see-through head-mounted display to create a diminished reality illusion that the robot is transparent, allowing users to see occluded areas behind [...]