12 accepted papers
Mobile robot teams often require decentralised autonomous navigation through narrow gaps in limited commu- nication environments (e.g., underground search-and-rescue op- erations). Existing navigation approaches exhibit suboptimal per- formance for avoiding multi-robot collisions in such bottlenecks…
A central challenge in lifelong imitation learning (LIL) is enabling agents to acquire new skills from expert demonstrations while retaining knowledge of previously learned tasks. Achieving this requires preserving the low-dimensional manifolds and geometric structures that underlie task representat…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) robot controllers usually aggregate many task objectives into one scalar reward. While large-scale proximal policy optimisation (PPO) has enabled impressive results such as robust real-world robot locomotion, many tasks still require careful reward tuning and remain britt…
Mobile robot teams often require decentralised autonomous navigation through narrow gaps in limited communication environments (e.g., underground search-and-rescue operations). Existing navigation approaches exhibit suboptimal performance for avoiding multi-robot collisions in such bottlenecks due t
Lifelong imitation learning for manipulation tasks poses significant challenges due to distribution shifts that occur in incremental learning steps. Existing methods often rely on unsupervised skill discovery to construct an ever-growing skill library or distillation from multiple policies, which ca
Accurate modelling of object deformations is crucial for a wide range of robotic manipulation tasks, where interacting with soft or deformable objects is essential. Current methods struggle to generalise to unseen forces or adapt to new objects, limiting their utility in real-world applications. We
In this paper, we introduce a pioneering end-to-end system demonstrated on a team of robots and sensors, designed to augment scientific exploration and discovery for human scientists in remote or inaccessible environments. We demonstrate and analyse our system's capability in a mock-up test-bed scen…
Dynamic platforms that operate over many unique terrain conditions typically require many behaviours. To transition safely, there must be an overlap of states between adjacent controllers. We develop a novel method for training setup policies that bridge the trajectories between pre-trained Deep Rei
Leveraging both the autonomy of robots and the expert knowledge of humans can enable a multi-robot system to complete missions in challenging environments with a high degree of adaptivity and robustness. This paper proposes a multi-modal task-based graphical user interface for controlling a heteroge…
Skill-based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising strategy to leverage prior knowledge for accelerated robot learning. Skills are typically extracted from expert demonstrations and are embedded into a latent space from which they can be sampled as actions by a high-level RL agent. H…
Legged robots often use separate control policies that are highly engineered for traversing difficult terrain such as stairs, gaps, and steps, where switching between policies is only possible when the robot is in a region that is common to adjacent controllers. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is…
The DARPA subterranean challenge requires teams of robots to traverse difficult and diverse underground environments. Traversing small gaps is one of the challenging scenarios that robots encounter. Imperfect sensor information makes it difficult for classical navigation methods, where behaviours re…