46 accepted papers
Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods struggle with complex dynamical systems that demand interactions at high frequencies or irregular time intervals. Continuous-time RL (CTRL) has emerged as a promising alternative by replacing discrete-time Bellman recursion with differentiable value funct…
Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) mitigates the difficulty of reward design by framing tasks as goal reaching rather than maximizing hand-crafted reward signals. In this setting, the optimal goal-conditioned value function naturally forms a quasimetric, motivating Quasimetric RL (QRL),…
Sequences of interdependent geometric constraints are central to many multi-agent Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) problems. However, existing methods for handling such constraint sequences struggle with partially ordered tasks and dynamic agent assignments. They typically assume static assignments a…
Safe multi-agent motion planning (MAMP) under task-induced constraints is a critical challenge in robotics. Many real-world scenarios require robots to navigate dynamic environments while adhering to manifold constraints imposed by tasks. For example, service robots must carry cups upright while avo…
Object rearrangement planning in complex, cluttered environments is a common challenge in warehouses, households, and rescue sites. Prior studies largely address monotone instances, whereas real-world tasks are often non-monotone—objects block one another and must be temporarily relocated to interme…
Diffusion policies have shown to be very efficient at learning complex, multi-modal behaviors for robotic manipulation. However, errors in generated action sequences can compound over time which can potentially lead to failure. Some approaches mitigate this by augmenting datasets with expert demonst…
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has made significant progress in recent years, but most algorithms still rely on a discrete-time Markov Decision Process (MDP) with fixed decision intervals. This formulation is often ill-suited for complex multi-agent dynamics, particularly in high-frequenc…
The motion planning problem requires finding a collision-free path between start and goal configurations in high-dimensional, cluttered spaces. Recent learning-based methods offer promising solutions, with self-supervised physics-informed approaches such as Neural Time Fields (NTFields) solving the …
Real-world robotic tasks often require agents to achieve sequences of goals while respecting time-varying safety constraints. However, standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) paradigms are fundamentally limited in these settings. A natural approach to these problems is to combine RL with Linear-time Te…
Robotic manipulation of rigid objects via deformable linear objects (DLO) such as ropes is an emerging field of research with applications in various rigid object transportation tasks. A few methods that exist in this field suffer from limited robot action and operational space, poor generalization
Neural Signed Distance Fields (SDFs) provide a differentiable environment representation to readily obtain collision checks and well-defined gradients for robot navigation tasks. However, updating neural SDFs as the scene evolves entails re-training, which is tedious, time consuming, and inefficient
Recent advancements in robot tool use have unlocked their usage for novel tasks, yet the predominant focus is on rigid-body tools, while the investigation of soft-body tools and their dynamic interaction with rigid bodies remains unexplored. This paper takes a pioneering step towards dynamic one-sho
Retrieving target objects from unknown, confined spaces remains a challenging task that requires integrated, task-driven active sensing and rearrangement planning. Previous approaches have independently addressed active sensing and rearrangement planning, limiting their practicality in real-world sc
Enabling robots to grasp and reposition human limbs can significantly enhance their ability to provide assistive care to individuals with severe mobility impairments, particularly in tasks such as robot-assisted bed bathing and dressing. However, existing assistive robotics solutions often assume th
Robot navigation in large, complex, and unknown indoor environments is a challenging problem. The existing approaches, such as traditional sampling-based methods, struggle with resolution control and scalability, while imitation learning-based methods require a large amount of demonstration data. Ac
Physics-informed Neural Motion Planners (PiN- MPs) provide a data-efficient framework for solving the Eikonal Partial Differential Equation (PDE) and representing the cost-to-go function for motion planning. However, their scalability remains limited by spectral bias and the complex loss landscape o
Object manipulation skills are necessary for robots operating in various daily-life scenarios, ranging from warehouses to hospitals. They allow the robots to manipulate the given object to their desired arrangement in the cluttered environment. The existing approaches to solving object manipulations
The motion planning problem involves finding a collision-free path from a robot's starting to its target configuration. Recently, self-supervised learning methods have emerged to tackle motion planning problems without requiring expensive expert demonstrations. They solve the Eikonal equation for tr…
Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) holds great promise for domains such as autonomous navigation and locomotion, where collecting interactive data is costly and unsafe. However, it remains challenging in practice due to the need to learn from datasets with limited coverage of the…
Synthesizing planning and control policies in robotics is a fundamental task, further complicated by factors such as complex logic specifications and high-dimensional robot dynamics. This paper presents a novel reinforcement learning approach to solving high-dimensional robot navigation tasks with c…
Language-guided active sensing is a robotics sub-task where a robot with an onboard sensor interacts efficiently with the environment via object manipulation to maximize perceptual information, following given language instructions. These tasks appear in various practical robotics applications, such…
Recent work has shown the promise of creating generalist, transformer-based, models for language, vision, and sequential decision-making problems. To create such models, we generally require centralized training objectives, data, and compute. It is of interest if we can more flexibly create generali…
Non-monotone object rearrangement planning in confined spaces such as cabinets and shelves is a widely occurring but challenging problem in robotics. Both the robot motion and the available regions for object relocation are highly constrained because of the limited space. This work proposes a Multi-…
Rearrangement planning for object retrieval tasks from confined spaces is a challenging problem, primarily due to the lack of open space for robot motion and limited perception. Several traditional methods exist to solve object retrieval tasks, but they require overhead cameras for perception and a…
Constrained Motion Planning (CMP) aims to find a collision-free path between the given start and goal configurations on the kinematic constraint manifolds. These problems appear in various scenarios ranging from object manipulation to legged-robot locomotion. However, the zero-volume nature of manif…
Autonomous vehicles require motion forecasting of their surrounding multiagents (pedestrians and vehicles) to make optimal decisions for navigation. The existing methods focus on techniques to utilize the positions and velocities of these agents and fail to capture semantic information from the scen…
Constrained robot motion planning is a ubiquitous need for robots interacting with everyday environments, but it is a notoriously difficult problem to solve. Many sampled points in a sample-based planner need to be rejected as they fall outside the constraint manifold, or require significant iterati…
Robot grasping is an actively studied area in robotics, mainly focusing on the quality of generated grasps for object manipulation. However, despite advancements, these methods do not consider the human-robot collaboration settings where robots and humans will have to grasp the same objects concurre…
Learning long-horizon tasks such as navigation has presented difficult challenges for successfully applying reinforcement learning to robotics. From another perspective, under known environments, sampling-based planning can robustly find collision-free paths in environments without learning. In this…
Recent research efforts have yielded significant advancements in manipulating objects under homogeneous settings where the robot is required to either manipulate rigid or deformable (soft) objects. However, the manipulation under heterogeneous setups that involve both rigid and one-dimensional (1D)
The robot exploration task has been widely studied with applications spanning from novel environment mapping to item delivery. For some time-critical tasks, such as rescue catastrophes, the agent is required to explore as efficiently as possible. Recently, Visit Frequency-based map representation ac…
Motion planning is integral to robotics applications such as autonomous driving, surgical robots, and industrial manipulators. Existing planning methods lack scalability to higher-dimensional spaces, while recent learning-based planners have shown promise in accelerating sampling-based motion planne
Object rearrangement is a fundamental problem in robotics with various practical applications ranging from managing warehouses to cleaning and organizing home kitchens. While existing research has primarily focused on single-agent solutions, real-world scenarios often require multiple robots to work
Neural Motion Planners (NMPs) have emerged as a promising tool for solving robot navigation tasks in complex environments. However, these methods often require expert data for learning, which limits their application to scenarios where data generation is time-consuming. Recent developments have also…
Motion planning (MP) is one of the core robotics problems requiring fast methods for finding a collision-free robot motion path connecting the given start and goal states. Neural motion planners (NMPs) demonstrate fast computational speed in finding path solutions but require a huge amount of expert…
Robotic manipulation tasks, such as object rearrangement, play a crucial role in enabling robots to interact with complex and arbitrary environments. Existing work focuses primarily on single-level rearrangement planning and, even if multiple levels exist, dependency relations among substructures ar…
Model-free Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) controllers have demonstrated promising results on various challenging non-linear control tasks. While a model-free DRL algorithm can solve unknown dynamics and high-dimensional problems, it lacks safety assurance. Although safety constraints can be encod…
Kinodynamic Motion Planning (KMP) is to find a robot motion subject to concurrent kinematics and dynamics constraints. To date, quite a few methods solve KMP problems and those that exist struggle to find near-optimal solutions and exhibit high computational complexity as the planning space dimensio
Robots will be expected to manipulate a wide variety of objects in complex and arbitrary ways as they become more widely used in human environments. As such; the rearrangement of objects has been noted to be an important benchmark for AI capabilities in recent years. We propose NeRP (Neural Rearrang…
The composition of elementary behaviors to solve challenging transfer learning problems is one of the key elements in building intelligent machines. To date, there has been plenty of work on learning task-specific policies or skills but almost no focus on composing necessary, task-agnostic skills to…
Reliable real-time planning for robots is essential in today's rapidly expanding automated ecosystem. In such environments, traditional methods that plan by relaxing constraints become unreliable or slow-down for kinematically constrained robots. This paper describes the algorithm Dynamic Motion Pla…
The presence of task constraints imposes a significant challenge to motion planning. Despite all recent advancements, existing algorithms are still computationally expensive for most planning problems. In this letter, we present Constrained Motion Planning Networks (CoMPNet), the first neural planne
We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics. Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy inverse reinforcement learning to learn near-optimal rewards…
Fast and efficient motion planning algorithms are crucial for many state-of-the-art robotics applications such as self-driving cars. Existing motion planning methods become ineffective as their computational complexity increases exponentially with the dimensionality of the motion planning problem. T…
Fast and efficient path generation is critical for robots operating in complex environments. This motion planning problem is often performed in a robot's actuation or configuration space, where popular pathfinding methods such as A*, RRT*, get exponentially more computationally expensive to execute…
Sampling-based Motion Planners (SMPs) have become increasingly popular as they provide collision-free path solutions regardless of obstacle geometry in a given environment. However, their computational complexity increases significantly with the dimensionality of the motion planning problem. Adaptiv…