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Christian Pek

11 accepted papers

2026

Cross-Entropy Optimization of Physically Grounded Task and Motion Plans

RA-L 2026

Autonomously performing tasks often requires robots to plan high-level discrete actions and continuous low-level motions to realize them. Previous TAMP algorithms have focused mainly on computational performance, completeness, or optimality by making the problem tractable through simplifications and

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Demonstrating Adaptive Mobile Manipulation in Retail Environments

RSS 2024poster

Although autonomous robots have great potential to boost efficiency and throughput across the whole retail chain, they are mostly being deployed in large warehouses and distribution centers. Deploying robots in stores with customers, such as supermarkets, requires substantially more development effo…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

SEQUEL: Semi-Supervised Preference-based RL with Query Synthesis via Latent Interpolation

ICRA 2024poster

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) poses as a recent research direction in robot learning, by allowing humans to teach robots through preferences on pairs of desired behaviours. Nonetheless, to obtain realistic robot policies, an arbitrarily large number of queries is required to be answer…

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2023

Aligning Human Preferences with Baseline Objectives in Reinforcement Learning

ICRA 2023poster

Practical implementations of deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) have been challenging due to an amplitude of factors, such as designing reward functions that cover every possible interaction. To address the heavy burden of robot reward engineering, we aim to leverage subjective human preferences…

Cited by 17SourceScholar
2023

Generating Scenarios from High-Level Specifications for Object Rearrangement Tasks

IROS 2023poster

Rearranging objects is an essential skill for robots. To quickly teach robots new rearrangements tasks, we would like to generate training scenarios from high-level specifications that define the relative placement of objects for the task at hand. Ideally, to guide the robot's learning we also want…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

VARIQuery: VAE Segment-Based Active Learning for Query Selection in Preference-Based Reinforcement Learning

IROS 2023poster

Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (RL) methods actively integrate human knowledge to create reward functions for various robotic tasks. Learning from preferences shows promise as alleviates the requirement of demonstrations by querying humans on state-action sequences. However, the limited gr…

Cited by 8SourceScholar
2022

Human-Feedback Shield Synthesis for Perceived Safety in Deep Reinforcement Learning

RA-L 2022

Despite the successes of deep reinforcement learning (RL), it is still challenging to obtain safe policies. Formal verification approaches ensure safety at all times, but usually overly restrict the agent’s behaviors, since they assume adversarial behavior of the environment. Instead of assuming adv

Cited by 14SourceScholar
2021

Encoding Human Driving Styles in Motion Planning for Autonomous Vehicles

ICRA 2021poster

Driving styles play a major role in the acceptance and use of autonomous vehicles. Yet, existing motion planning techniques can often only incorporate simple driving styles that are modeled by the developers of the planner and not tailored to the passenger. We present a new approach to encode human…

Cited by 28SourceScholar
2018

Efficient Computation of Invariably Safe States for Motion Planning of Self-Driving Vehicles

IROS 2018poster

Safe motion planning requires that a vehicle reaches a set of safe states at the end of the planning horizon. However, safe states of vehicles have not yet been systematically defined in the literature, nor does a computationally efficient way to obtain them for online motion planning exist. To tack…

Cited by 31SourceScholar