Safe and Efficient Path Planning under Uncertainty via Deep Collision Probability Fields

Estimating collision probabilities between robots and environmental obstacles or other moving agents is crucial to ensure safety during path planning. This is an important building block of modern planning algorithms in many application scenarios such as autonomous driving, where noisy sensors perceive obstacles. While many approaches exist, they either provide too conservative estimates of the collision probabilities or are computationally intensive due to their sampling-based nature. To deal with these issues, we introduce Deep Collision Probability Fields, a neural-based approach for computing collision probabilities of arbitrary objects with arbitrary unimodal uncertainty distributions. Our approach relegates the computationally intensive estimation of collision probabilities via sampling at the training step, allowing for fast neural network inference of the constraints during planning. In extensive experiments, we show that Deep Collision Probability Fields can produce reasonably accurate collision probabilities (up to 10^{-3}) for planning and that our approach can be easily plugged into standard path planning approaches to plan safe paths on 2-D maps containing uncertain static and dynamic obstacles. Additional material, code, and videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/ral-dcpf.

ActionFlow: Equivariant, Accurate, and Efficient Policies with Spatially Symmetric Flow Matching

Spatial understanding is a critical aspect of most robotic tasks, particularly when generalization is important. Despite the impressive results of deep generative models in complex manipulation tasks, the absence of a representation that encodes intricate spatial relationships between observations and actions often limits spatial generalization, necessitating large amounts of demonstrations. To tackle this problem, we introduce a novel policy class, ActionFlow. ActionFlow integrates spatial symmetry inductive biases while generating expressive action sequences. On the representation level, ActionFlow introduces an SE(3) Invariant Transformer architecture, which enables informed spatial reasoning based on the relative SE(3) poses between observations and actions. For action generation, ActionFlow leverages Flow Matching, a state-of-the-art deep generative model known for generating high-quality samples with fast inference - an essential property for feedback control. In combination, ActionFlow policies exhibit strong spatial and locality biases and SE(3)-equivariant action generation. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ActionFlow and its two main components on several simulated and real-world robotic manipulation tasks and confirm that we can obtain equivariant, accurate, and efficient policies with spatially symmetric flow matching. Project website: https://flowbasedpolicies.github.io/

Deep Generative Models in Robotics: A Survey on Learning from Multimodal Demonstrations

Learning from Demonstrations, the field that proposes to learn robot behavior models from data, is gaining popularity with the emergence of deep generative models. Although the problem has been studied for years under names such as Imitation Learning, Behavioral Cloning, or Inverse Reinforcement Learning, classical methods have relied on models that don't capture complex data distributions well or don't scale well to large numbers of demonstrations. In recent years, the robot learning community has shown increasing interest in using deep generative models to capture the complexity of large datasets. In this survey, we aim to provide a unified and comprehensive review of the last year's progress in the use of deep generative models in robotics. We present the different types of models that the community has explored, such as energy-based models, diffusion models, action value maps, or generative adversarial networks. We also present the different types of applications in which deep generative models have been used, from grasp generation to trajectory generation or cost learning. One of the most important elements of generative models is the generalization out of distributions. In our survey, we review the different decisions the community has made to improve the generalization of the learned models. Finally, we highlight the research challenges and propose a number of future directions for learning deep generative models in robotics.

MoVEInt: Mixture of Variational Experts for Learning Human-Robot Interactions from Demonstrations

Shared dynamics models are important for capturing the complexity and variability inherent in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Therefore, learning such shared dynamics models can enhance coordination and adaptability to enable successful reactive interactions with a human partner. In this work, we propose a novel approach for learning a shared latent space representation for HRIs from demonstrations in a Mixture of Experts fashion for reactively generating robot actions from human observations. We train a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to learn robot motions regularized using an informative latent space prior that captures the multimodality of the human observations via a Mixture Density Network (MDN). We show how our formulation derives from a Gaussian Mixture Regression formulation that is typically used approaches for learning HRI from demonstrations such as using an HMM/GMM for learning a joint distribution over the actions of the human and the robot. We further incorporate an additional regularization to prevent "mode collapse", a common phenomenon when using latent space mixture models with VAEs. We find that our approach of using an informative MDN prior from human observations for a VAE generates more accurate robot motions compared to previous HMM-based or recurrent approaches of learning shared latent representations, which we validate on various HRI datasets involving interactions such as handshakes, fistbumps, waving, and handovers. Further experiments in a real-world human-to-robot handover scenario show the efficacy of our approach for generating successful interactions with four different human interaction partners.

Learning Multimodal Behaviors from Scratch with Diffusion Policy Gradient

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically parameterize the policy as a deep network that outputs either a deterministic action or a stochastic one modeled as a Gaussian distribution, hence restricting learning to a single behavioral mode. Meanwhile, diffusion models emerged as a powerful framework for multimodal learning. However, the use of diffusion policies in online RL is hindered by the intractability of policy likelihood approximation, as well as the greedy objective of RL methods that can easily skew the policy to a single mode. This paper presents Deep Diffusion Policy Gradient (DDiffPG), a novel actor-critic algorithm that learns from scratch multimodal policies parameterized as diffusion models while discovering and maintaining versatile behaviors. DDiffPG explores and discovers multiple modes through off-the-shelf unsupervised clustering combined with novelty-based intrinsic motivation. DDiffPG forms a multimodal training batch and utilizes mode-specific Q-learning to mitigate the inherent greediness of the RL objective, ensuring the improvement of the diffusion policy across all modes. Our approach further allows the policy to be conditioned on mode-specific embeddings to explicitly control the learned modes. Empirical studies validate DDiffPG's capability to master multimodal behaviors in complex, high-dimensional continuous control tasks with sparse rewards, also showcasing proof-of-concept dynamic online replanning when navigating mazes with unseen obstacles.

Kinematically Constrained Human-like Bimanual Robot-to-Human Handovers

Bimanual handovers are crucial for transferring large, deformable or delicate objects. This paper proposes a framework for generating kinematically constrained human-like bimanual robot motions to ensure seamless and natural robot-to-human object handovers. We use a Hidden Semi-Markov Model (HSMM) to reactively generate suitable response trajectories for a robot based on the observed human partner's motion. The trajectories are adapted with task space constraints to ensure accurate handovers. Results from a pilot study show that our approach is perceived as more human--like compared to a baseline Inverse Kinematics approach.

Transition State Clustering for Interaction Segmentation and Learning

Hidden Markov Models with an underlying Mixture of Gaussian structure have proven effective in learning Human-Robot Interactions from demonstrations for various interactive tasks via Gaussian Mixture Regression. However, a mismatch occurs when segmenting the interaction using only the observed state of the human compared to the joint state of the human and the robot. To enhance this underlying segmentation and subsequently the predictive abilities of such Gaussian Mixture-based approaches, we take a hierarchical approach by learning an additional mixture distribution on the states at the transition boundary. This helps prevent misclassifications that usually occur in such states. We find that our framework improves the performance of the underlying Gaussian Mixture-based approach, which we evaluate on various interactive tasks such as handshaking and fistbumps.

Evetac: An Event-based Optical Tactile Sensor for Robotic Manipulation

Optical tactile sensors have recently become popular. They provide high spatial resolution, but struggle to offer fine temporal resolutions. To overcome this shortcoming, we study the idea of replacing the RGB camera with an event-based camera and introduce a new event-based optical tactile sensor called Evetac. Along with hardware design, we develop touch processing algorithms to process its measurements online at 1000 Hz. We devise an efficient algorithm to track the elastomer's deformation through the imprinted markers despite the sensor's sparse output. Benchmarking experiments demonstrate Evetac's capabilities of sensing vibrations up to 498 Hz, reconstructing shear forces, and significantly reducing data rates compared to RGB optical tactile sensors. Moreover, Evetac's output and the marker tracking provide meaningful features for learning data-driven slip detection and prediction models. The learned models form the basis for a robust and adaptive closed-loop grasp controller capable of handling a wide range of objects. We believe that fast and efficient event-based tactile sensors like Evetac will be essential for bringing human-like manipulation capabilities to robotics. The sensor design is open-sourced at https://sites.google.com/view/evetac .

Learning Multimodal Latent Dynamics for Human-Robot Interaction

This article presents a method for learning well-coordinated Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) from Human-Human Interactions (HHI). We devise a hybrid approach using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) as the latent space priors for a Variational Autoencoder to model a joint distribution over the interacting agents. We leverage the interaction dynamics learned from HHI to learn HRI and incorporate the conditional generation of robot motions from human observations into the training, thereby predicting more accurate robot trajectories. The generated robot motions are further adapted with Inverse Kinematics to ensure the desired physical proximity with a human, combining the ease of joint space learning and accurate task space reachability. For contact-rich interactions, we modulate the robot's stiffness using HMM segmentation for a compliant interaction. We verify the effectiveness of our approach deployed on a Humanoid robot via a user study. Our method generalizes well to various humans despite being trained on data from just two humans. We find that Users perceive our method as more human-like, timely, and accurate and rank our method with a higher degree of preference over other baselines.

Robust Adversarial Reinforcement Learning via Bounded Rationality Curricula

Robustness against adversarial attacks and distribution shifts is a long-standing goal of Reinforcement Learning (RL). To this end, Robust Adversarial Reinforcement Learning (RARL) trains a protagonist against destabilizing forces exercised by an adversary in a competitive zero-sum Markov game, whose optimal solution, i.e., rational strategy, corresponds to a Nash equilibrium. However, finding Nash equilibria requires facing complex saddle point optimization problems, which can be prohibitive to solve, especially for high-dimensional control. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for adversarial RL based on entropy regularization to ease the complexity of the saddle point optimization problem. We show that the solution of this entropy-regularized problem corresponds to a Quantal Response Equilibrium (QRE), a generalization of Nash equilibria that accounts for bounded rationality, i.e., agents sometimes play random actions instead of optimal ones. Crucially, the connection between the entropy-regularized objective and QRE enables free modulation of the rationality of the agents by simply tuning the temperature coefficient. We leverage this insight to propose our novel algorithm, Quantal Adversarial RL (QARL), which gradually increases the rationality of the adversary in a curriculum fashion until it is fully rational, easing the complexity of the optimization problem while retaining robustness. We provide extensive evidence of QARL outperforming RARL and recent baselines across several MuJoCo locomotion and navigation problems in overall performance and robustness.