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David B D'Ambrosio

6 accepted papers

2025

Achieving Human Level Competitive Robot Table Tennis

ICRA 2025

Achieving human-level performance on real world tasks is a north star for the robotics community. We present the first learned robot agent that reaches amateur humanlevel performance in competitive table tennis. Table tennis is a physically demanding sport that takes humans years to master. We contr

Cited by 43SourceScholar
2025

Learning Diverse Robot Striking Motions with Diffusion Models and Kinematically Constrained Gradient Guidance

ICRA 2025

Advances in robot learning have enabled robots to generate skills for a variety of tasks. Yet, robot learning is typically sample inefficient, struggles to learn from data sources exhibiting varied behaviors, and does not naturally incorporate constraints. These properties are critical for fast, agi

Cited by 8SourceScholar
2025

SAS-Prompt: Large Language Models as Numerical Optimizers for Robot Self-Improvement

ICRA 2025

We demonstrate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform iterative self-improvement of robot policies. An important insight of this paper is that LLMs have a built-in ability to perform (stochastic) numerical optimization and that this property can be leveraged for explainable robot pol

Cited by 3SourceScholar
2023

Robotic Table Tennis: A Case Study into a High Speed Learning System

RSS 2023poster

We present a deep-dive into a real-world robotic learning system that, in previous work, was shown to be capable of hundreds of table tennis rallies with a human and has the ability to precisely return the ball to desired targets. This system puts together a highly optimized perception subsystem, a…

2022

Learning High Speed Precision Table Tennis on a Physical Robot

IROS 2022poster

Learning goal conditioned control in the real world is a challenging open problem in robotics. Reinforcement learning systems have the potential to learn autonomously via trial-and-error, but in practice the costs of manual reward design, ensuring safe exploration, and hyperparameter tuning are ofte…

Cited by 16SourceScholar
2022

i-Sim2Real: Reinforcement Learning of Robotic Policies in Tight Human-Robot Interaction Loops

CoRL 2022oral

Sim-to-real transfer is a powerful paradigm for robotic reinforcement learning. The ability to train policies in simulation enables safe exploration and large-scale data collection quickly at low cost. However, prior works in sim-to-real transfer of robotic policies typically do not involve any huma…

Cited by 66SourceScholar