16 accepted papers
Quasi (pseudo/approximate) periodic signals often occur in natural settings, particularly when a periodic signal is recorded with noise. In this work, we develop a new dynamical equation system to construct a family of Quasi-periodic Gaussian Processes (QPGP). We provide a computationally inexpensiv…
In surgery, the application of appropriate force levels is critical for the success and safety of a given procedure. While many studies are focused on measuring in situ forces, little attention has been devoted to relating these observed forces to surgical techniques. Answering questions like "Can c…
Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs) offer great versatility for encoding, generating and adapting complex end-effector trajectories. DMPs are also very well suited to learning manipulation skills from human demonstration. However, the reactive nature of DMPs restricts their applicability for tool use…
The ability to adapt to changing environments and settings is essential for robots acting in dynamic and unstructured environments or working alongside humans with varied abilities or preferences. This work introduces an extremely simple and effective approach to adapting neural models in response t…
Manipulation skills involving contact and friction are inherent to many robotics tasks. Using the class of motor primitives for peg-in-hole like insertions, we study how robots can learn such skills. Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMP) are a popular way of extracting such policies through behaviour cl
Humans can easily reason about the sequence of high level actions needed to complete tasks, but it is particularly difficult to instill this ability in robots trained from relatively few examples. This work considers the task of neural action sequencing conditioned on a single reference visual state
Context plays a significant role in the generation of motion for dynamic agents in interactive environments. This work proposes a modular method that utilises a learned model of the environment for motion prediction. This modularity explicitly allows for unsupervised adaptation of trajectory predict
Learning low-dimensional latent state space dynamics models has proven powerful for enabling vision-based planning and learning for control. We introduce a latent dynamics learning framework that is uniquely designed to induce proportional controlability in the latent space, thus enabling the use of…
Robot control policies for temporally extended and sequenced tasks are often characterized by discontinuous switches between different local dynamics. These change-points are often exploited in hierarchical motion planning to build approximate models and to facilitate the design of local, region-spe
Presents corrections to the abstract in the above named paper.
We propose a model that is able to perform physical parameter estimation of systems from video, where the differential equations governing the scene dynamics are known, but labeled states or objects are not available. Existing physical scene understanding methods require either object state supervis…
Precision cutting of soft-tissue remains a challenging problem in robotics, due to the complex and unpredictable mechanical behaviour of tissue under manipulation. Here, we consider the challenge of cutting along the boundary between two soft mediums, a problem that is made extremely difficult due t…
Sensors are routinely mounted on robots to acquire various forms of measurements in spatio-temporal fields. Locating features within these fields and reconstruction (mapping) of the dense fields can be challenging in resource-constrained situations, such as when trying to locate the source of a gas
Learning from demonstration is an effective method for human users to instruct desired robot behaviour. However, for most non-trivial tasks of practical interest, efficient learning from demonstration depends crucially on inductive bias in the chosen structure for rewards/costs and policies. We addr
Hybrid systems are a compact and natural mechanism with which to address problems in robotics. This work introduces an approach to learn hybrid systems from demonstrations, with an emphasis on extracting models that are explicitly verifiable and easily interpreted by robot operators. We fit a sequen…
Behaviour cloning is a commonly used strategy for imitation learning and can be extremely effective in constrained domains. However, in cases where the dynamics of an environment may be state dependent and varying, behaviour cloning places a burden on model capacity and the number of demonstrations