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Byron Boots

110 accepted papers

2026

Model Predictive Adversarial Imitation Learning for Planning from Observation

ICLR 2026poster

Humans can often perform a new task after observing a few demonstrations by inferring the underlying intent. For robots, recovering the intent of the demonstrator through a learned reward function can enable more efficient, interpretable, and robust imitation through planning. A common paradigm for…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Using Non-Expert Data to Robustify Imitation Learning Via Offline Reinforcement Learning

ICRA 2026poster

Imitation learning has proven effective for training robots to perform complex tasks from expert human demonstrations. However, it remains limited by its reliance on high-quality, task-specific data, restricting adaptability to the diverse range of real-world object configurations and scenarios. In …

2025

Agile Continuous Jumping in Discontinuous Terrains

ICRA 2025

We focus on agile, continuous, and terrain-adaptive jumping of quadrupedal robots in discontinuous terrains such as stairs and stepping stones. Unlike single-step jumping, continuous jumping requires accurately executing highly dynamic motions over long horizons, which is challenging for existing ap

Cited by 17SourcecodeScholar
2025

Details Matter for Indoor Open-vocabulary 3D Instance Segmentation

ICCV 2025poster

Unlike closed-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation that is often trained end-to-end, open-vocabulary 3D instance segmentation (OV-3DIS) often leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to generate 3D instance proposals and classify them. While various concepts have been proposed from existing research,…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Dynamic Non-Prehensile Object Transport via Model-Predictive Reinforcement Learning

ICRA 2025

We investigate the problem of teaching a robot manipulator to perform dynamic non-prehensile object transport, also known as the ‘robot waiter’ task, from a limited set of real-world demonstrations. We propose an approach that combines batch reinforcement learning (RL) with modelpredictive control (

Cited by 4SourceScholar
2025

Long Range Navigator (LRN): Extending robot planning horizons beyond metric maps

CoRL 2025poster

A robot navigating an outdoor environment with no prior knowledge of the space must rely on its local sensing, which is in the form of a local metric map or local policy with some fixed horizon. A limited planning horizon can often result in myopic decisions leading the robot off course or worse, in…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Self-supervised perception for tactile skin covered dexterous hands

CoRL 2025poster

We present PercepSkin, a pre-trained encoder for magnetic skin sensors distributed across the fingertips, phalanges, and palm of a dexterous robot hand. Magnetic tactile skins offer a flexible form factor for hand-wide coverage with fast response times, in contrast to vision-based tactile sensors t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Tactile Beyond Pixels: Multisensory Touch Representations for Robot Manipulation

CoRL 2025oral

We present TacX, the first multisensory touch representations across four tactile modalities: image, audio, motion, and pressure. Trained on ~1M contact-rich interactions collected with the Digit 360 sensor, TacX captures complementary touch signals at diverse temporal and spatial scales. By leverag…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Uncertainty-aware Accurate Elevation Modeling for Off-road Navigation via Neural Processes

CoRL 2025poster

Terrain elevation modeling for off-road navigation aims to accurately estimate changes in terrain geometry in real-time and quantify the corresponding uncertainties. Having precise estimations and uncertainties plays a crucial role in planning and control algorithms to explore safe and reliable mane…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Wheeled Lab: Modern Sim2Real for Low-cost, Open-source Wheeled Robotics

CoRL 2025poster

Simulation has been pivotal in recent robotics milestones and is poised to play a prominent role in the field's future. However, recent robotic advances often rely on expensive and high-maintenance platforms, limiting access to broader robotics audiences. This work introduces Wheeled Lab, a framewor…

Cited by 5SourceScholar
2024

Avoid Everything: Model-Free Collision Avoidance with Expert-Guided Fine-Tuning

CoRL 2024poster

The world is full of clutter. In order to operate effectively in uncontrolled, real world spaces, robots must navigate safely by executing tasks around obstacles while in proximity to hazards. Creating safe movement for robotic manipulators remains a long-standing challenge in robotics, particularly…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2024

LocoMan: Advancing Versatile Quadrupedal Dexterity with Lightweight Loco-Manipulators

IROS 2024poster

Quadrupedal robots have emerged as versatile agents capable of locomoting and manipulating in complex environments. Traditional designs typically rely on the robot’s inherent body parts or incorporate top-mounted arms for manipulation tasks. However, these configurations may limit the robot’s operat…

Cited by 13SourceScholar
2024

Model Predictive Control for Aggressive Driving Over Uneven Terrain

RSS 2024poster

Terrain traversability in unstructured off-road autonomy has traditionally relied on semantic classification, resource-intensive dynamics models, or purely geometry-based methods to predict vehicle-terrain interactions. While inconsequential at low speeds, uneven terrain subjects our full-scale syst…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2024

Multi-Sample Long Range Path Planning under Sensing Uncertainty for Off-Road Autonomous Driving

ICRA 2024poster

We focus on the problem of long-range dynamic replanning for off-road autonomous vehicles, where a robot plans paths through a previously unobserved environment while continuously receiving noisy local observations. An effective approach for planning under sensing uncertainty is determinization, whe…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2024

Sparsh: Self-supervised touch representations for vision-based tactile sensing

CoRL 2024poster

In this work, we introduce general purpose touch representations for the increasingly accessible class of vision-based tactile sensors. Such sensors have led to many recent advances in robot manipulation as they markedly complement vision, yet solutions today often rely on task and sensor specific h…

Cited by 10SourcecodeScholar
2024

Toward Self-Righting and Recovery in the Wild: Challenges and Benchmarks

ICRA 2024poster

Self-recovery is a critical capability for robust, agile robots operating in the real world. Given truly challenging terrain, it is nearly inevitable that, at some point, the robot will fail and subsequently need to recover if it is to continue its task. One critical subset of recovery is standing b…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2024

V-STRONG: Visual Self-Supervised Traversability Learning for Off-road Navigation

ICRA 2024poster

Reliable estimation of terrain traversability is critical for the successful deployment of autonomous systems in wild, outdoor environments. Given the lack of large-scale annotated datasets for off-road navigation, strictly-supervised learning approaches remain limited in their generalization abilit…

Cited by 32SourceScholar
2023

Adversarial Model for Offline Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

We propose a novel model-based offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, called Adversarial Model for Offline Reinforcement Learning (ARMOR), which can robustly learn policies to improve upon an arbitrary reference policy regardless of data coverage. ARMOR is designed to optimize policies for t…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar
2023

CAFA: Class-Aware Feature Alignment for Test-Time Adaptation

ICCV 2023poster

Despite recent advancements in deep learning, deep neural networks continue to suffer from performance degradation when applied to new data that differs from training data. Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to address this challenge by adapting a model to unlabeled data at test time. TTA can be applie…

Cited by 25PDFScholar
2023

CAJun: Continuous Adaptive Jumping using a Learned Centroidal Controller

CoRL 2023poster

We present CAJun, a novel hierarchical learning and control framework that enables legged robots to jump continuously with adaptive jumping distances. CAJun consists of a high-level centroidal policy and a low-level leg controller. In particular, we use reinforcement learning (RL) to train the centr…

Cited by 30SourceScholar
2023

DATT: Deep Adaptive Trajectory Tracking for Quadrotor Control

CoRL 2023oral

Precise arbitrary trajectory tracking for quadrotors is challenging due to unknown nonlinear dynamics, trajectory infeasibility, and actuation limits. To tackle these challenges, we present DATT, a learning-based approach that can precisely track arbitrary, potentially infeasible trajectories in the…

Cited by 27SourcecodeScholar
2023

DYNAMO-GRASP: DYNAMics-aware Optimization for GRASP Point Detection in Suction Grippers

CoRL 2023poster

In this research, we introduce a novel approach to the challenge of suction grasp point detection. Our method, exploiting the strengths of physics-based simulation and data-driven modeling, accounts for object dynamics during the grasping process, markedly enhancing the robot's capability to handle…

Cited by 7SourceScholar
2023

LiDAR-UDA: Self-ensembling Through Time for Unsupervised LiDAR Domain Adaptation

ICCV 2023oral

We introduce LiDAR-UDA, a novel two-stage self-training-based Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) method for LiDAR segmentation. Existing self-training methods use a model trained on labeled source data to generate pseudo labels for target data and refine the predictions via fine-tuning the network…

Cited by 9PDFcodeScholar
2023

MAHALO: Unifying Offline Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning from Observations

ICML 2023poster

We study a new paradigm for sequential decision making, called offline policy learning from observations (PLfO). Offline PLfO aims to learn policies using datasets with substandard qualities: 1) only a subset of trajectories is labeled with rewards, 2) labeled trajectories may not contain actions, 3…

2023

Neural Contact Fields: Tracking Extrinsic Contact with Tactile Sensing

ICRA 2023poster

We present Neural Contact Fields, a method that brings together neural fields and tactile sensing to address the problem of tracking extrinsic contact between object and environment. Knowing where the external contact occurs is a first step towards methods that can actively control it in facilitatin…

Cited by 28SourcecodeScholar
2023

Stackelberg Games for Learning Emergent Behaviors During Competitive Autocurricula

ICRA 2023poster

Autocurricular training is an important sub-area of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) that allows multiple agents to learn emergent skills in an unsupervised co-evolving scheme. The robotics community has experimented auto-curricular training with physically grounded problems, such as robust…

Cited by 7SourceScholar
2023

TerrainNet: Visual Modeling of Complex Terrain for High-speed, Off-road Navigation

RSS 2023poster

Effective use of camera-based vision systems is essential for robust performance in autonomous off-road driving, particularly in the high-speed regime. Despite success in structured, on-road settings, current end-to-end approaches for scene prediction have yet to be successfully adapted for complex…

Cited by 62SourcePDFScholar
2022

Adversarial Sampling-Based Motion Planning

RA-L 2022

There are many scenarios in which a mobile agent may not want its path to be predictable. Examples include preserving privacy or confusing an adversary. However, this desire for deception can conflict with the need for a low path cost. Optimal plans such as those produced by RRT* may have low path c

Cited by 11SourceScholar
2022

Geometric Fabrics: Generalizing Classical Mechanics to Capture the Physics of Behavior

RA-L 2022

Classical mechanical systems are central to controller design in energy shaping methods of geometric control. However, their expressivity is limited by position-only metrics and the intimate link between metric and geometry. Recent work on Riemannian Motion Policies (RMPs) has shown that shedding th

Cited by 49SourceScholar
2022

Learning Implicit Priors for Motion Optimization

IROS 2022poster

Motion optimization is an effective framework for generating smooth and safe trajectories for robotic manipulation tasks. However, it suffers from local optima that hinder its applicability, especially for multi-objective tasks. In this paper, we study this problem in light of the integration of Ene…

Cited by 28SourceScholar
2022

Learning Semantics-Aware Locomotion Skills from Human Demonstration

CoRL 2022poster

The semantics of the environment, such as the terrain type and property, reveals important information for legged robots to adjust their behaviors. In this work, we present a framework that learns semantics-aware locomotion skills from perception for quadrupedal robots, such that the robot can trave…

Cited by 12SourceScholar
2022

Motion Policy Networks

CoRL 2022poster

Collision-free motion generation in unknown environments is a core building block for robot manipulation. Generating such motions is challenging due to multiple objectives; not only should the solutions be optimal, the motion generator itself must be fast enough for real-time performance and reliab…

Cited by 66SourcecodeScholar
2022

Stein Variational Probabilistic Roadmaps

ICRA 2022poster

Efficient and reliable generation of global path plans are necessary for safe execution and deployment of autonomous systems. In order to generate planning graphs which adequately resolve the topology of a given environment, many sampling-based motion planners resort to coarse, heuristically-driven…

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2021

Blending MPC & Value Function Approximation for Efficient Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2021poster

Model-Predictive Control (MPC) is a powerful tool for controlling complex, real-world systems that uses a model to make predictions about future behavior. For each state encountered, MPC solves an online optimization problem to choose a control action that will minimize future cost. This is a surpri…

Cited by 43SourcePDFScholar
2021

Dual Online Stein Variational Inference for Control and Dynamics

RSS 2021poster

Model predictive control (MPC) schemes have a proven track record for delivering aggressive and robust performance in many challenging control tasks; coping with nonlinear system dynamics; constraints; and observational noise. Despite their success; these methods often rely on simple control distrib…

2021

Fast and Efficient Locomotion via Learned Gait Transitions

CoRL 2021oral

We focus on the problem of developing energy efficient controllers for quadrupedal robots. Animals can actively switch gaits at different speeds to lower their energy consumption. In this paper, we devise a hierarchical learning framework, in which distinctive locomotion gaits and natural gait trans…

Cited by 108SourcecodeScholar
2021

Grasping with Chopsticks: Combating Covariate Shift in Model-free Imitation Learning for Fine Manipulation

ICRA 2021poster

Billions of people use chopsticks, a simple yet versatile tool, for fine manipulation of everyday objects. The small, curved, and slippery tips of chopsticks pose a challenge for picking up small objects, making them a suitably complex test case. This paper leverages human demonstrations to develop…

Cited by 54SourceScholar
2021

Motivating Physical Activity via Competitive Human-Robot Interaction

CoRL 2021oral

This project aims to motivate research in competitive human-robot interaction by creating a robot competitor that can challenge human users in certain scenarios such as physical exercise and games. With this goal in mind, we introduce the Fencing Game, a human-robot competition used to evaluate both…

Cited by 12SourceScholar
2021

Quantum Tensor Networks, Stochastic Processes, and Weighted Automata

AISTATS 2021poster

Modeling joint probability distributions over sequences has been studied from many perspectives. The physics community developed matrix product states, a tensor-train decomposition for probabilistic modeling, motivated by the need to tractably model many-body systems. But similar models have also be…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2021

STORM: An Integrated Framework for Fast Joint-Space Model-Predictive Control for Reactive Manipulation

CoRL 2021oral

Sampling-based model-predictive control (MPC) is a promising tool for feedback control of robots with complex, non-smooth dynamics, and cost functions. However, the computationally demanding nature of sampling-based MPC algorithms has been a key bottleneck in their application to high-dimensional ro…

Cited by 152SourcecodeScholar
2021

Safe Reinforcement Learning Using Advantage-Based Intervention

ICML 2021spotlight

Many sequential decision problems involve finding a policy that maximizes total reward while obeying safety constraints. Although much recent research has focused on the development of safe reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms that produce a safe policy after training, ensuring safety during train…

2021

Semantic Terrain Classification for Off-Road Autonomous Driving

CoRL 2021poster

Producing dense and accurate traversability maps is crucial for autonomous off-road navigation. In this paper, we focus on the problem of classifying terrains into 4 cost classes (free, low-cost, medium-cost, obstacle) for traversability assessment. This requires a robot to reason about both semanti…

Cited by 100SourceScholar
2021

Towards Coordinated Robot Motions: End-to-End Learning of Motion Policies on Transform Trees

IROS 2021poster

Generating robot motion that fulfills multiple tasks simultaneously is challenging due to the geometric constraints imposed on the robot. In this paper, we propose to solve multi-task problems through learning structured policies from human demonstrations. Our structured policy is inspired by RMPflo…

Cited by 9SourceScholar
2020

A Reduction from Reinforcement Learning to No-Regret Online Learning

AISTATS 2020poster

We present a reduction from reinforcement learning (RL) to no-regret online learning based on the saddle-point formulation of RL, by which "any" online algorithm with sublinear regret can generate policies with provable performance guarantees. This new perspective decouples the RL problem into two p…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2020

Collaborative Interaction Models for Optimized Human-Robot Teamwork

IROS 2020poster

Effective human-robot collaboration requires informed anticipation. The robot must anticipate the human’s actions, but also react quickly and intuitively when its predictions are wrong. The robot must plan its actions to account for the human’s own plan, with the knowledge that the human’s behavior…

Cited by 22SourceScholar
2020

Composing Task-Agnostic Policies with Deep Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2020poster

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…

Cited by 34SourceScholar
2020

Exploiting Singular Configurations for Controllable, Low-Power Friction Enhancement on Unmanned Ground Vehicles

RA-L 2020

This letter describes the design, validation, and performance of a new type of adaptive wheel morphology for unmanned ground vehicles. Our adaptive wheel morphology uses a spiral cam to create a system that enables controllable deployment of high friction surfaces. The overall design is modular, bat

Cited by 2SourceScholar
2020

Expressiveness and Learning of Hidden Quantum Markov Models

AISTATS 2020poster

Extending classical probabilistic reasoning using the quantum mechanical view of probability has been of recent interest, particularly in the development of hidden quantum Markov models (HQMMs) to model stochastic processes. However, there has been little progress in characterizing the expressivenes…

2020

IRIS: Implicit Reinforcement without Interaction at Scale for Learning Control from Offline Robot Manipulation Data

ICRA 2020poster

Learning from offline task demonstrations is a problem of great interest in robotics. For simple short-horizon manipulation tasks with modest variation in task instances, offline learning from a small set of demonstrations can produce controllers that successfully solve the task. However, leveraging…

Cited by 146SourceScholar
2020

Intra Order-preserving Functions for Calibration of Multi-Class Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2020poster

Predicting calibrated confidence scores for multi-class deep networks is important for avoiding rare but costly mistakes. A common approach is to learn a post-hoc calibration function that transforms the output of the original network into calibrated confidence scores while maintaining the network's…

2020

Learning a Contact-Adaptive Controller for Robust, Efficient Legged Locomotion

CoRL 2020

We present a hierarchical framework that combines model-based control and reinforcement learning (RL) to synthesize robust controllers for a quadruped (the Unitree Laikago). The system consists of a high-level controller that learns to choose from a set of primitives in response to changes in the en

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2020

Online Learning with Continuous Variations: Dynamic Regret and Reductions

AISTATS 2020poster

Online learning is a powerful tool for analyzing iterative algorithms. However, the classic adversarial setup fails to capture regularity that can exist in practice. Motivated by this observation, we establish a new setup, called Continuous Online Learning (COL), where the gradient of online loss f…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2020

Pairwise Similarity Knowledge Transfer for Weakly Supervised Object Localization

ECCV 2020poster

Weakly Supervised Object Localization (WSOL) methods only require image level labels as opposed to expensive bounding box annotations required by fully supervised algorithms. We study the problem of learning localization model on target classes with weakly supervised image labels, helped by a fully…

2019

Accelerating Imitation Learning with Predictive Models

AISTATS 2019poster

Sample efficiency is critical in solving real-world reinforcement learning problems where agent-environment interactions can be costly. Imitation learning from expert advice has proved to be an effective strategy for reducing the number of interactions required to train a policy. Online imitation le…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2019

Adversarial Imitation via Variational Inverse Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2019poster

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…

Cited by 90SourcePDFScholar
2019

Joint Inference of Kinematic and Force Trajectories with Visuo-Tactile Sensing

ICRA 2019poster

To perform complex tasks, robots must be able to interact with and manipulate their surroundings. One of the key challenges in accomplishing this is robust state estimation during physical interactions, where the state involves not only the robot and the object being manipulated, but also the state…

Cited by 38SourceScholar
2019

Learning Reactive Motion Policies in Multiple Task Spaces from Human Demonstrations

CoRL 2019

Complex manipulation tasks often require non-trivial and coordinated movements of different parts of a robot. In this work, we address the challenges associated with learning and reproducing the skills required to execute such complex tasks. Specifically, we decompose a task into multiple subtasks a

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2019

Learning to Find Common Objects Across Few Image Collections

ICCV 2019poster

Given a collection of bags where each bag is a set of images, our goal is to select one image from each bag such that the selected images are from the same object class. We model the selection as an energy minimization problem with unary and pairwise potential functions. Inspired by recent few-shot…

Cited by 8PDFcodeScholar
2019

Online Motion Planning Over Multiple Homotopy Classes with Gaussian Process Inference

IROS 2019poster

Efficient planning in dynamic and uncertain environments is a fundamental challenge in robotics. In the context of trajectory optimization, the feasibility of paths can change as the environment evolves. Therefore, it can be beneficial to reason about multiple possible paths simultaneously. We build…

Cited by 24SourceScholar
2019

Provably Efficient Imitation Learning from Observation Alone

ICML 2019oral

We study Imitation Learning (IL) from Observations alone (ILFO) in large-scale MDPs. While most IL algorithms rely on an expert to directly provide actions to the learner, in this setting the expert only supplies sequences of observations. We design a new model-free algorithm for ILFO, Forward Adver…

2019

Riemannian Motion Policy Fusion through Learnable Lyapunov Function Reshaping

CoRL 2019

RMPflow is a recently proposed policy-fusion framework based on differential geometry. While RMPflow has demonstrated promising performance, it requires the user to provide sensible subtask policies as Riemannian motion policies (RMPs: a motion policy and an importance matrix function), which can be

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2019

Robust Learning of Tactile Force Estimation through Robot Interaction

ICRA 2019poster

Current methods for estimating force from tactile sensor signals are either inaccurate analytic models or task-specific learned models. In this paper, we explore learning a robust model that maps tactile sensor signals to force. We specifically explore learning a mapping for the SynTouch BioTac sens…

Cited by 71SourceScholar
2019

Trajectory-wise Control Variates for Variance Reduction in Policy Gradient Methods

CoRL 2019

Policy gradient methods have demonstrated success in reinforcement learning tasks with high-dimensional continuous state and action spaces. But they are also notoriously sample inefficient, which can be attributed, at least in part, to the high variance in estimating the gradient of the task objecti

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2019

Truncated Back-propagation for Bilevel Optimization

AISTATS 2019poster

Bilevel optimization has been recently revisited for designing and analyzing algorithms in hyperparameter tuning and meta learning tasks. However, due to its nested structure, evaluating exact gradients for high-dimensional problems is computationally challenging. One heuristic to circumvent this di…

Cited by 319SourcePDFScholar
2018

Agile Autonomous Driving using End-to-End Deep Imitation Learning

RSS 2018poster

We present an end-to-end imitation learning system for agile, off-road autonomous driving using only low-cost on-board sensors. By imitating a model predictive controller equipped with advanced sensors, we train a deep neural network control policy to map raw, high-dimensional observations to contin…

Cited by 396SourcePDFScholar
2018

Deep Forward and Inverse Perceptual Models for Tracking and Prediction

ICRA 2018poster

We consider the problems of learning forward models that map state to high-dimensional images and inverse models that map high-dimensional images to state in robotics. Specifically, we present a perceptual model for generating video frames from state with deep networks, and provide a framework for i…

Cited by 25SourceScholar
2018

Differentiable MPC for End-to-end Planning and Control

NeurIPS 2018poster

We present foundations for using Model Predictive Control (MPC) as a differentiable policy class for reinforcement learning. This provides one way of leveraging and combining the advantages of model-free and model-based approaches. Specifically, we differentiate through MPC by using the KKT conditio…

2018

Initialization matters: Orthogonal Predictive State Recurrent Neural Networks

ICLR 2018poster

Learning to predict complex time-series data is a fundamental challenge in a range of disciplines including Machine Learning, Robotics, and Natural Language Processing. Predictive State Recurrent Neural Networks (PSRNNs) (Downey et al.) are a state-of-the-art approach for modeling time-series data w…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2018

Learning Generalizable Robot Skills from Demonstrations in Cluttered Environments

IROS 2018poster

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a popular approach to endowing robots with skills without having to program them by hand. Typically, LfD relies on human demonstrations in clutter-free environments. This prevents the demonstrations from being affected by irrelevant objects, whose influence can o…

Cited by 16SourceScholar
2018

Learning and Inference in Hilbert Space with Quantum Graphical Models

NeurIPS 2018poster

Quantum Graphical Models (QGMs) generalize classical graphical models by adopting the formalism for reasoning about uncertainty from quantum mechanics. Unlike classical graphical models, QGMs represent uncertainty with density matrices in complex Hilbert spaces. Hilbert space embeddings (HSEs) also…

2018

Optical Sensing and Control Methods for Soft Pneumatically Actuated Robotic Manipulators

ICRA 2018poster

A low-cost optical sensing method for improved measurement and control of soft pneumatic manipulator motion is presented. The core of a soft continuum robot is embedded with several optically-diffuse elastomer sensors which attenuate light depending on their strain mode and degree. The optical senso…

Cited by 17SourceScholar
2018

Orthogonally Decoupled Variational Gaussian Processes

NeurIPS 2018poster

Gaussian processes (GPs) provide a powerful non-parametric framework for reasoning over functions. Despite appealing theory, its superlinear computational and memory complexities have presented a long-standing challenge. State-of-the-art sparse variational inference methods trade modeling accuracy a…

2018

Semantically Meaningful View Selection

IROS 2018poster

An understanding of the nature of objects could help robots to solve both high-level abstract tasks and improve performance at lower-level concrete tasks. Although deep learning has facilitated progress in image understanding, a robot's performance in problems like object recognition often depends o…

Cited by 12SourcecodeScholar
2018

Sparse Gaussian Processes on Matrix Lie Groups: A Unified Framework for Optimizing Continuous-Time Trajectories

ICRA 2018poster

Continuous-time trajectories are useful for reasoning about robot motion in a wide range of tasks. Sparse Gaussian processes (GPs) can be used as a non-parametric representation for trajectory distributions that enables fast trajectory optimization by sparse GP regression. However, most previous app…

Cited by 34SourceScholar
2018

TRUNCATED HORIZON POLICY SEARCH: COMBINING REINFORCEMENT LEARNING & IMITATION LEARNING

ICLR 2018poster

In this paper, we propose to combine imitation and reinforcement learning via the idea of reward shaping using an oracle. We study the effectiveness of the near- optimal cost-to-go oracle on the planning horizon and demonstrate that the cost- to-go oracle shortens the learner’s planning horizon as f…

Cited by 112SourcePDFScholar
2017

4D crop monitoring: Spatio-temporal reconstruction for agriculture

ICRA 2017poster

Autonomous crop monitoring at high spatial and temporal resolution is a critical problem in precision agriculture. While Structure from Motion and Multi-View Stereo algorithms can finely reconstruct the 3D structure of a field with low-cost image sensors, these algorithms fail to capture the dynamic…

Cited by 140SourceScholar
2017

Approximately optimal continuous-time motion planning and control via Probabilistic Inference

ICRA 2017poster

The problem of optimal motion planing and control is fundamental in robotics. However, this problem is intractable for continuous-time stochastic systems in general and the solution is difficult to approximate if non-instantaneous nonlinear performance indices are present. In this work, we provide a…

Cited by 17SourceScholar
2017

Deeply AggreVaTeD: Differentiable Imitation Learning for Sequential Prediction

ICML 2017poster

Recently, researchers have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on sequential prediction problems using deep neural networks and Reinforcement Learning (RL). For some of these problems, oracles that can demonstrate good performance may be available during training, but are not used by plain RL…

Cited by 299SourcePDFScholar
2017

Exact Bounds on the Contact Driven Motion of a Sliding Object, With Applications to Robotic Pulling

RSS 2017poster

This paper explores the quasi-static motion of a planar slider being pushed or pulled through a single contact point assumed not to slip. The main contribution is to derive a method for computing exact bounds on the object's motion for classes of pressure distributions where the center of pressure i…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2017

Information theoretic MPC for model-based reinforcement learning

ICRA 2017poster

We introduce an information theoretic model predictive control (MPC) algorithm capable of handling complex cost criteria and general nonlinear dynamics. The generality of the approach makes it possible to use multi-layer neural networks as dynamics models, which we incorporate into our MPC algorithm…

Cited by 711SourceScholar
2017

Learning from Conditional Distributions via Dual Embeddings

AISTATS 2017poster

Many machine learning tasks, such as learning with invariance and policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, can be characterized as problems of learning from conditional distributions. In such problems, each sample x itself is associated with a conditional distribution $p(z|x)$ represented by sam…

Cited by 156SourcePDFScholar
2017

Motion planning with graph-based trajectories and Gaussian process inference

ICRA 2017poster

Motion planning as trajectory optimization requires generating trajectories that minimize a desired objective function or performance metric. Finding a globally optimal solution is often intractable in practice: despite the existence of fast motion planning algorithms, most are prone to local minima…

Cited by 37SourceScholar
2017

Prediction under Uncertainty in Sparse Spectrum Gaussian Processes with Applications to Filtering and Control

ICML 2017poster

Sparse Spectrum Gaussian Processes (SSGPs) are a powerful tool for scaling Gaussian processes (GPs) to large datasets. Existing SSGP algorithms for regression assume deterministic inputs, precluding their use in many real-world robotics and engineering applications where accounting for input uncerta…

Cited by 48SourcePDFScholar
2017

Predictive State Recurrent Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2017poster

We present a new model, Predictive State Recurrent Neural Networks (PSRNNs), for filtering and prediction in dynamical systems. PSRNNs draw on insights from both Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Predictive State Representations (PSRs), and inherit advantages from both types of models. Like many…

2017

Predictive-State Decoders: Encoding the Future into Recurrent Networks

NeurIPS 2017poster

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a vital modeling technique that rely on internal states learned indirectly by optimization of a supervised, unsupervised, or reinforcement training loss. RNNs are used to model dynamic processes that are characterized by underlying latent states whose form is oft…

Cited by 46SourcePDFScholar
2017

Simultaneous Trajectory Estimation and Planning via Probabilistic Inference

RSS 2017poster

We provide a unified probabilistic framework for trajectory estimation and planning. The key idea is to view these two problems, usually considered separately, as a single problem. At each time-step the robot is tasked with finding the complete continuous-time trajectory from start to goal. This can…

2017

Towards Robust Skill Generalization: Unifying Learning from Demonstration and Motion Planning

CoRL 2017

In this paper, we present Combined Learning from demonstration And Motion Planning (CLAMP) as an efficient approach to skill learning and generalizable skill reproduction. CLAMP combines the strengths of Learning from Demonstration (LfD) and motion planning into a unifying framework. We carry out pr

2016

Functional Gradient Motion Planning in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces

RSS 2016poster

We introduce a functional gradient descent tra- jectory optimization algorithm for robot motion planning in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHSs). Functional gra- dient algorithms are a popular choice for motion planning in complex many-degree-of-freedom robots, since they (in theory) work by di…

Cited by 76SourcePDFScholar
2016

Learning to Filter with Predictive State Inference Machines

ICML 2016poster

Latent state space models are a fundamental and widely used tool for modeling dynamical systems. However, they are difficult to learn from data and learned models often lack performance guarantees on inference tasks such as filtering and prediction. In this work, we present the PREDICTIVE STATE INFE…

Cited by 60SourcePDFScholar
2016

Motion Planning as Probabilistic Inference using Gaussian Processes and Factor Graphs

RSS 2016poster

With the increased use of high degree-of-freedom robots that must perform tasks in real-time, there is a need for fast algorithms for motion planning. In this work, we view motion planning from a probabilistic perspective. We consider smooth continuous-time trajectories as samples from a Gaussian pr…

Cited by 171SourcePDFScholar
2016

The Nonparametric Kernel Bayes Smoother

AISTATS 2016poster

Recently, significant progress has been made developing kernel mean expressions for Bayesian inference. An important success in this domain is the nonparametric kernel Bayes’ filter (nKB-filter), which can be used for sequential inference in state space models. We expand upon this work by introducin…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar