11 accepted papers
Humans and animals exhibit flexible locomotion strategies, such as learning to walk within minutes, and efficient adaptation to changes in morphology. In contrast, modern locomotion controllers are manually tuned for specific embodiments. In this paper, we present LocoFormer, a generalist policy tha…
Emulating human-like dexterity with robotic hands has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. In recent years, machine learning has demanded robot hands to be reliable, inexpensive and easy-to-reproduce. For the past few years we have been investigating how to address these demands. We will demo…
Humans can perform parkour by traversing obstacles in a highly dynamic fashion requiring precise eye-muscle coordination and movement. Getting robots to do the same task requires overcoming similar challenges. Classically, this is done by independently engineering perception, actuation, and control…
Estimating odometry, where an accumulating position and rotation is tracked, has critical applications in many areas of robotics as a form of state estimation such as in SLAM, navigation, and controls. During deployment of a legged robot, a vision system's tracking can easily get lost. Instead, usin…
Despite extreme sample inefficiency, on-policy reinforcement learning, aka policy gradients, has become a fundamental tool in decision-making problems. With the recent advances in GPU-driven simulation, the ability to collect large amounts of data for RL training has scaled exponentially. However, w…
While there has been remarkable progress recently in the fields of manipulation and locomotion mobile manipulation remains a long-standing challenge. Compared to locomotion or static manipulation a mobile system must make a diverse range of long-horizon tasks feasible in unstructured and dynamic env…
While there have been significant strides in dexterous manipulation, most of it is limited to benchmark tasks like in-hand reorientation which are of limited utility in the real world. The main benefit of dexterous hands over two-fingered ones is their ability to pickup tools and other objects (incl…
Dexterous manipulation has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. While machine learning techniques have shown some promise, results have largely been currently limited to simulation. This can be mostly attributed to the lack of suitable hardware. In this paper, we present LEAP Hand, a low-cost…
We exploit the complementary strengths of vision and proprioception to develop a point-goal navigation system for legged robots, called VP-Nav. Legged systems are capable of traversing more complex terrain than wheeled robots, but to fully utilize this capability, we need a high-level path planner i…
Animals are capable of precise and agile locomotion using vision. Replicating this ability has been a long-standing goal in robotics. The traditional approach has been to decompose this problem into elevation mapping and foothold planning phases. The elevation mapping, however, is susceptible to fai…
Deep extreme multi-label learning (XML) requires training deep architectures that can tag a data point with its most relevant subset of labels from an extremely large label set. XML applications such as ad and product recommendation involve labels rarely seen during training but which nevertheless h…