36 accepted papers
Accurate prediction of crop states (e.g., phenology stages and cold hardiness) is essential for timely farm management decisions such as irrigation, fertilization, and canopy management to optimize crop yield and quality. While traditional biophysical models can be used for season-long predictions,
This paper introduces a novel approach to budgeted online active learning from finite-horizon data streams with extremely limited labeling budgets. In agricultural applications, such streams might include daily weather data over a growing season, and labels require costly measurements of weather-dep
Near surface temperature inversions are periods in which a low layer of warm air is trapped between cooler air higher up in the atmosphere and dense cooler air below it near the surface level. By causing cooler air to pool near the surface level, inversions can have detrimental effects for crop grow
We study decentralized cooperative transport using teams of N-quadruped robots with arm that must pinch, lift, and move ungraspable objects through physical contact alone. Unlike prior work that relies on rigid mechanical coupling between robots and objects, we address the more challenging setting w…
Offline safe reinforcement learning (OSRL) involves learning a decision-making policy to maximize rewards from a fixed batch of training data to satisfy pre-defined safety constraints. However, adapting to varying safety constraints during deployment without retraining remains an under-explored chal…
We propose a novel approach to learn relational policies for classical planning based on learning to rank actions. We introduce a new graph representation that explicitly captures action information and propose a Graph Neural Network (GNN) architecture augmented with Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) to…
We study the problem of Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning (OSRL), where the goal is to learn a reward-maximizing policy from fixed data under a cumulative cost constraint. We propose a novel OSRL approach that frames the problem as a minimax objective and solves it by combining offline RL with onl…
Missing values in multivariate time series data can harm machine learning performance and introduce bias. These gaps arise from sensor malfunctions, blackouts, and human error and are typically addressed by data imputation. Previous work has tackled the imputation of missing data in random, complete…
Snow Water-Equivalent (SWE)—the amount of water available if snowpack is melted—is a key decision variable used by water management agencies to make irrigation, flood control, power generation, and drought management decisions. SWE values vary spatiotemporally—affected by weather, topography, and ot…
Fire Departments conduct inspections to prevent fires but it is unclear how to best allocate their limited inspection resources across the properties in a city. Currently, they use their intuition and experience to decide on which properties to inspect and lack a data-driven approach that could lead…
"This work focuses on generating realistic, physically-based human behaviors from multi-modal inputs, which may only partially specify the desired motion. For example, the input may come from a VR controller providing arm motion and body velocity, partial key-point animation, computer vision applied…
We study the problem of natural language-based control of dynamic bipedal locomotion from the perspective of operational robustness and hardware safety. Existing work on natural language-based robot control has focused on episodic command execution for stable robot platforms, such as fixed-based man…
Payload transport over flat terrain via multi-wheel robot carriers is well-understood, highly effective, and configurable. In this paper, our goal is to provide similar effectiveness and configurability for transport over rough terrain that is more suitable for legs rather than wheels. For this purp…
Reinforcement learning (RL) for bipedal locomotion has recently demonstrated robust gaits over moderate terrains using only proprioceptive sensing. However, such blind controllers will fail in environments where robots must anticipate and adapt to local terrain, which requires visual perception. In…
A necessary capability for humanoid robots is the ability to stand and walk while rejecting natural disturbances. Recent progress has been made using sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) to train such locomotion controllers, with approaches differing mainly in their reward functions. However, pri…
In this work we propose a learning-based approach to box loco-manipulation for a humanoid robot. This is a particularly challenging problem due to the need for whole-body coordination in order to lift boxes of varying weight, position, and orientation while maintaining balance. To address this chall…
Cold temperatures during fall and spring have the potential to cause frost damage to grapevines and other fruit plants, which can significantly decrease harvest yields. To help prevent these losses, farmers deploy expensive frost mitigation measures, such as, sprinklers, heaters, and wind machines,…
In this paper, we explore the space of running gaits for the bipedal robot Cassie. Our first contribution is to present an approach for optimizing gait efficiency across a spectrum of speeds with the aim of enabling extremely high-speed running on hardware. This raises the question of how the result…
In this work, we propose a learning approach for 3D dynamic bipedal walking when footsteps are constrained to stepping stones. While recent work has shown progress on this problem, real-world demonstrations have been limited to relatively simple open-loop, perception-free scenarios. Our main contrib…
Recent work on sim-to-real learning for bipedal locomotion has demonstrated new levels of robustness and agility over a variety of terrains. However, that work, and most prior bipedal locomotion work, have not considered locomotion under a variety of external loads that can significantly influence t…
Recently, work on reinforcement learning (RL) for bipedal robots has successfully learned controllers for a variety of dynamic gaits with robust sim-to-real demonstrations. In order to maintain balance, the learned controllers have full freedom of where to place the feet, resulting in highly robust…
Accurate and precise terrain estimation is a difficult problem for robot locomotion in real-world environments. Thus; it is useful to have systems that do not depend on accurate estimation to the point of fragility. In this paper; we explore the limits of such an approach by investigating the proble…
We investigate a deep reinforcement learning (RL) architecture that supports explaining why a learned agent prefers one action over another. The key idea is to learn action-values that are directly represented via human-understandable properties of expected futures. This is realized via the embedded…
We study an approach to offline reinforcement learning (RL) based on optimally solving finitely-represented MDPs derived from a static dataset of experience. This approach can be applied on top of any learned representation and has the potential to easily support multiple solution objective…
In this letter, we describe an approach to achieve dynamic legged locomotion on physical robots which combines existing methods for control with reinforcement learning. Specifically, our goal is a control hierarchy in which highest-level behaviors are planned through reduced-order models, which desc
Recent work has demonstrated the success of reinforcement learning (RL) for training bipedal locomotion policies for real robots. This prior work, however, has focused on learning joint-coordination controllers based on an objective of following joint trajectories produced by already available contr…
Attention maps are popular tools for explaining the decisions of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image classification. Typically, for each image of interest, a single attention map is produced, which assigns weights to pixels based on their importance to the classification. We argue that a…
We introduce an approach for understanding control policies represented as recurrent neural networks. Recent work has approached this problem by transforming such recurrent policy networks into finite-state machines (FSM) and then analyzing the equivalent minimized FSM. While this led to interesting…
We study the problem of realizing the full spectrum of bipedal locomotion on a real robot with sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL). A key challenge of learning legged locomotion is describing different gaits, via reward functions, in a way that is intuitive for the designer and specific enough t…
Controlling a non-statically stable biped is a difficult problem largely due to the complex hybrid dynamics involved. Recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) for simulation-based training of neural network controllers that successfully transfer to real bipeds.…
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are an effective representation of control policies for a wide range of reinforcement and imitation learning problems. RNN policies, however, are particularly difficult to explain, understand, and analyze due to their use of continuous-valued memory vectors and obser…
We apply fast online trajectory optimization for multi-step motion planning to Cassie, a bipedal robot designed to exploit natural spring-mass locomotion dynamics using lightweight, compliant legs. Our motion planning formulation simultaneously optimizes over center of mass motion, footholds, and ce…
Open category detection is the problem of detecting "alien" test instances that belong to categories or classes that were not present in the training data. In many applications, reliably detecting such aliens is central to ensuring the safety and accuracy of test set predictions. Unfortunately, ther…
While deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) agents are effective at maximizing rewards, it is often unclear what strategies they use to do so. In this paper, we take a step toward explaining deep RL agents through a case study using Atari 2600 environments. In particular, we focus on using saliency…
In this work, we study a poorly understood trade-off between accuracy and runtime costs for deep semantic video segmentation. While recent work has demonstrated advantages of learning to speed-up deep activity detection, it is not clear if similar advantages will hold for our very different segmenta…
This paper formulates and presents a solution to a new problem called person count localization. Given a video of a crowded scene, our goal is to output for each frame a set of: 1) Detections optimally covering both isolated individuals and cluttered groups of people; and 2) Counts of people inside…