12 accepted papers
utonomous racing pushes vehicles to their physical limits, requiring control policies that can rapidly adapt to localized changes in track conditions, such as varying surface friction. Current Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches rely either on ground-truth system identification, which is impracti…
Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control is a widely used sampling-based approach for real-time control, valued for its flexibility in handling arbitrary dynamics and cost functions. However, it often suffers from high-frequency noise in the sampled control trajectories, which hinders the searc…
In model-based control, dynamics models are typically trained by minimizing open-loop prediction errors uniformly across all states. However, due to finite model capacity, this misallocates representational power, as not all prediction errors impact the downstream closed-loop performance equally. In…
The performance of optimization-based robot motion planning algorithms is highly dependent on the initial solutions, commonly obtained by running a sampling-based planner to obtain a collision-free path. However, these methods can be slow in high-dimensional and complex scenes and produce nonsmooth
Model Predictive Control (MPC) is among the most widely adopted and reliable methods for robot control, relying critically on an accurate dynamics model. However, existing dynamics models used in the gradient-based MPC are limited by computational complexity and state representation. To address this…
Fully autonomous vehicles promise enhanced safety and efficiency. However, ensuring reliable operation in challenging corner cases requires control algorithms capable of performing at the vehicle limits. We address this requirement by considering the task of autonomous racing and propose solving it
Trajectory planning under kinodynamic constraints is fundamental for advanced robotics applications that require dexterous, reactive, and rapid skills in complex environments. These constraints, which may represent task, safety, or actuator limitations, are essential for ensuring the proper function…
Manipulating Deformable Linear Objects (DLOs) is a challenging task for a robotic system due to their unpredictable configuration, high-dimensional state space and complex nonlinear dynamics. This paper presents a framework addressing the manipulation of DLOs, specifically targeting the model-based
Velocity estimation is of great importance in autonomous racing. Still, existing solutions are characterized by limited accuracy, especially in the case of aggressive driving or poor generalization to unseen road conditions. To address these issues, we propose to utilize Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF…
Deep Reinforcement Learning techniques are achieving state-of-the-art results in robust legged locomotion. While there exists a wide variety of legged platforms such as quadruped, humanoids, and hexapods, the field is still missing a single learning framework that can control all these different emb…
While manipulating rigid objects is an extensively explored research topic, deformable linear object (DLO) manipulation seems significantly underdeveloped. A potential reason for this is the inherent difficulty in describing and observing the state of the DLO as its geometry changes during manipulat…
This paper demonstrates how an efficient repre-sentation of the planned path using B-splines, and a construction procedure that takes advantage of the neural network's inductive bias, speed up both the inference and training of a DNN-based motion planner. We build upon our recent work on learning lo…