Jean-Baptiste Mouret

Failure Identification in Imitation Learning Via Statistical and Semantic Filtering

Multi-Contact Whole-Body Force Control for Position-Controlled Robots

Many humanoid and multi-legged robots are controlled in positions rather than in torques, which prevents direct control of contact forces, and hampers their ability to create multiple contacts to enhance their balance, such as placing a hand on a wall or a handrail. This letter introduces the SEIKO

Learning Height for Top-Down Grasps with the DIGIT Sensor

We address the problem of grasping unknown objects identified from top-down images with a parallel gripper. When no object 3D model is available, the state-of-the-art grasp generators identify the best candidate locations for planar grasps using the RGBD image. However, while they generate the Carte…

Workstation Suitability Maps: Generating Ergonomic Behaviors on a Population of Virtual Humans With Multi-Task Optimization

In industrial workstations, the morphology of the worker is a key factor for the feasibility and the ergonomics of an activity. Existing digital human modeling tools can simulate different morphologies at work, but hardly scale to a large population of workers because of limited consideration of mor

Automatic Tuning and Selection of Whole-Body Controllers

Designing controllers for complex robots such as humanoids is not an easy task. Often, researchers hand-tune controllers, but this is a time-consuming approach that yields a single controller which cannot generalize well to varied tasks. This work presents a method which uses the NSGA-II multi-objec…

Data-efficient learning of object-centric grasp preferences

Grasping made impressive progress during the last few years thanks to deep learning. However, there are many objects for which it is not possible to choose a grasp by only looking at an RGB-D image, might it be for physical reasons (e.g., a hammer with uneven mass distribution) or task constraints (…

First Do Not Fall: Learning to Exploit a Wall With a Damaged Humanoid Robot

Humanoid robots could replace humans in hazardous situations but most of such situations are equally dangerous for them, which means that they have a high chance of being damaged and falling. We hypothesize that humanoid robots would be mostly used in buildings, which makes them likely to be close t

Multi-Objective Trajectory Optimization to Improve Ergonomics in Human Motion

Work-related musculoskeletal disorders are a major health issue often caused by awkward postures. Identifying and recommending more ergonomic body postures requires optimizing the worker’s motion with respect to ergonomics criteria based on the human kinematic/kinetic state. However, many ergonomics

Human Posture Prediction During Physical Human-Robot Interaction

When a human is interacting physically with a robot to accomplish a task, his/her posture is inevitably influenced by the robot movement. Since the human is not controllable, an active robot imposing a collaborative trajectory should predict the most likely human posture. This prediction should cons

Fast Online Adaptation in Robotics through Meta-Learning Embeddings of Simulated Priors

Meta-learning algorithms can accelerate the model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) algorithms by finding an initial set of parameters for the dynamical model such that the model can be trained to match the actual dynamics of the system with only a few data-points. However, in the real world, a ro…

Learning Robust Task Priorities and Gains for Control of Redundant Robots

Generating complex movements in redundant robots like humanoids is usually done by means of multi-task controllers based on quadratic programming, where a multitude of tasks is organized according to strict or soft priorities. Time-consuming tuning and expertise are required to choose suitable task

Bayesian Optimization with Automatic Prior Selection for Data-Efficient Direct Policy Search

One of the most interesting features of Bayesian optimization for direct policy search is that it can leverage priors (e.g., from simulation or from previous tasks) to accelerate learning on a robot. In this paper, we are interested in situations for which several priors exist but we do not know in…

Multi-objective Model-based Policy Search for Data-efficient Learning with Sparse Rewards

The most data-efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning in robotics are model-based policy search algorithms, which alternate between learning a dynamical model of the robot and optimizing a policy to maximize the expected return given the model and its uncertainties. However, the current algo

Using Parameterized Black-Box Priors to Scale Up Model-Based Policy Search for Robotics

The most data-efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning in robotics are model-based policy search algorithms, which alternate between learning a dynamical model of the robot and optimizing a policy to maximize the expected return given the model and its uncertainties. Among the few proposed ap…

Black-box data-efficient policy search for robotics

The most data-efficient algorithms for reinforcement learning (RL) in robotics are based on uncertain dynamical models: after each episode, they first learn a dynamical model of the robot, then they use an optimization algorithm to find a policy that maximizes the expected return given the model and…