Publications

Our teams aspire to make discoveries that impact everyone, and core to our approach is sharing our research and tools to fuel progress in the field.

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Our teams aspire to make discoveries that impact everyone, and core to our approach is sharing our research and tools to fuel progress in the field.

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1 - 15 of 199 publications
    See Through Vehicles: Fully Occluded Vehicle Detection with Millimeter Wave Radar
    Chenming He
    Chengzhen Meng
    Chunwang He
    Beibei Wang
    Yubo Yan
    Yanyong Zhang
    MobiCom 2024: The 30th Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking
    Preview abstract A crucial task in autonomous driving is to continuously detect nearby vehicles. Problems thus arise when a vehicle is occluded and becomes “unseeable”, which may lead to accidents. In this study, we develop mmOVD, a system that can detect fully occluded vehicles by involving millimeter-wave radars to capture the ground-reflected signals passing beneath the blocking vehicle’s chassis. The foremost challenge here is coping with ghost points caused by frequent multi-path reflections, which highly resemble the true points. We devise a set of features that can efficiently distinguish the ghost points by exploiting the neighbor points’ spatial and velocity distributions. We also design a cumulative clustering algorithm to effectively aggregate the unstable ground reflected radar points over consecutive frames to derive the bounding boxes of the vehicles. We have evaluated mmOVD in both controlled environments and real-world environments. In an underground garage and two campus roads, we conducted controlled experiments in 56 scenes with 8 vehicles, including a minibus and a motorcycle. Our system accurately detects occluded vehicles for the first time, with a 91.1% F1 score for occluded vehicle detection and a 100% success rate for occlusion event detection. More importantly, we drove 324km on crowded roads at a speed up to 70km per hour and show we could achieve an occlusion detection success rate of 92% and a low false alarm rate of 4% with only 10% of the training data in complex real-world environments. View details
    Scalable Multi-Sensor Robot Imitation Learning via Task-Level Domain Consistency
    Armando Fuentes
    Daniel Ho
    Eric Victor Jang
    Matt Bennice
    Mohi Khansari
    Nicolas Sievers
    Yuqing Du
    ICRA (2023) (to appear)
    Preview abstract Recent work in visual end-to-end learning for robotics has shown the promise of imitation learning across a variety of tasks. However, such approaches are often expensive and require vast amounts of real world training demonstrations. Additionally, they rely on a time-consuming evaluation process for identifying the best model to deploy in the real world. These challenges can be mitigated by simulation - by supplementing real world data with simulated demonstrations and using simulated evaluations to identify strong policies. However, this introduces the well-known ``reality gap'' problem, where simulator inaccuracies decorrelates performance in simulation from reality. In this paper, we build on top of prior work in GAN-based domain adaptation and introduce the notion of a Task Consistency Loss (TCL), a self-supervised contrastive loss that encourages sim and real alignment both at the feature and action-prediction level. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the challenging task of latched-door opening with a 9 Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) mobile manipulator from raw RGB and depth images. While most prior work in vision-based manipulation operate from a fixed, third person view, mobile manipulation couples the challenges of locomotion and manipulation with greater visual diversity and action space complexity. We find that we are able to achieve 77% success on seen and unseen scenes, a +30% increase from the baseline, using only ~16 hours of teleoperation demonstrations in sim and real. View details
    Robotic Table Tennis: A Case Study into a High Speed Learning System
    Jon Abelian
    Saminda Abeyruwan
    Michael Ahn
    Justin Boyd
    Erwin Johan Coumans
    Omar Escareno
    Wenbo Gao
    Navdeep Jaitly
    Juhana Kangaspunta
    Satoshi Kataoka
    Gus Kouretas
    Yuheng Kuang
    Corey Lynch
    Thinh Nguyen
    Ken Oslund
    Barney J. Reed
    Anish Shankar
    Avi Singh
    Grace Vesom
    Peng Xu
    Robotics: Science and Systems (2023)
    Preview abstract We present a deep-dive into a learning robotic 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 and novel perception subsystem, a high-speed low-latency robot controller, a simulation paradigm that can prevent damage in the real world and also train policies for zero-shot transfer, and automated real world environment resets that enable autonomous training and evaluation on physical robots. We complement a complete system description including numerous design decisions that are typically not widely disseminated, with a collection of ablation studies that clarify the importance of mitigating various sources of latency, accounting for training and deployment distribution shifts, robustness of the perception system, and sensitivity to policy hyper-parameters and choice of action space. A video demonstrating the components of our system and details of experimental results is included in the supplementary material. View details
    A Connection between Actor Regularization and Critic Regularization in Reinforcement Learning
    Benjamin Eysenbach
    Matthieu Geist
    Ruslan Salakhutdinov
    Sergey Levine
    International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) (2023)
    Preview abstract As with any machine learning problem with limited data, effective offline RL algorithms require careful regularization to avoid overfitting, with most methods regularizing either the actor or the critic. These methods appear distinct. Actor regularization (e.g., behavioral cloning penalties) is simpler and has appealing convergence properties, while critic regularization typically requires significantly more compute because it involves solving a game, but it has appealing lower-bound guarantees. Empirically, prior work alternates between claiming better results with actor regularization and critic regularization. In this paper, we show that these two regularization techniques can be equivalent under some assumptions: regularizing the critic using a CQL-like objective is equivalent to updating the actor with a BC- like regularizer and with a SARSA Q-value (i.e., “1-step RL”). Our experiments show that this theoretical model makes accurate, testable predictions about the performance of CQL and one-step RL. While our results do not definitively say whether users should prefer actor regularization or critic regularization, our results hint that actor regularization methods may be a simpler way to achieve the desirable properties of critic regularization. The results also suggest that the empirically- demonstrated benefits of both types of regularization might be more a function of implementation details rather than objective superiority. View details
    Single-Level Differentiable Contact Simulation
    Simon Le Cleac'h
    Mac Schwager
    Zachary Manchester
    Pete Florence
    IEEE RAL (2023)
    Preview abstract We present a differentiable formulation of rigid-body contact dynamics for objects and robots represented as compositions of convex primitives. Existing optimization-based approaches simulating contact between convex primitives rely on a bilevel formulation that separates collision detection and contact simulation. These approaches are unreliable in realistic contact simulation scenarios because isolating the collision detection problem introduces contact location non-uniqueness. Our approach combines contact simulation and collision detection into a unified single-level optimization problem. This disambiguates the collision detection problem in a physics-informed manner. Compared to previous differentiable simulation approaches, our formulation features improved simulation robustness and computational complexity improved by more than an order of magnitude. We provide a numerically efficient implementation of our formulation in the Julia language called \href{https://github.com/simon-lc/DojoLight.jl}{DojoLight.jl}. View details
    Preview abstract In recent years, much progress has been made in learning robotic manipulation policies that can follow natural language instructions. Common approaches involve learning methods that operate on offline datasets, such as task-specific teleoperated demonstrations or on hindsight labeled robotic experience. Such methods work reasonably but rely strongly on the assumption of clean data: teleoperated demonstrations are collected with specific tasks in mind, while hindsight language descriptions rely on expensive human labeling. Recently, large-scale pretrained language and vision-language models like CLIP have been applied to robotics in the form of learning representations and planners. However, can these pretrained models also be used to cheaply impart internet-scale knowledge onto offline datasets, providing access to skills contained in the offline dataset that weren't necessarily reflected in ground truth labels? We investigate fine-tuning a reward model on a small dataset of robot interactions with crowd-sourced natural language labels and using the model to relabel instructions of a large offline robot dataset. The resulting dataset with diverse language skills is used to train imitation learning policies, which outperform prior methods by up to 30% when evaluated on a diverse set of novel language instructions that were not contained in the original dataset. View details
    Mechanical Search on Shelves with Efficient Stacking and Destacking of Objects
    Huang Huang
    Letian Fu
    Michael Danielczuk
    Chung Min Kim
    Zachary Tam
    Jeff Ichnowski
    Brian Ichter
    Ken Goldberg
    The International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR) (2023)
    Preview abstract Stacking increases storage efficiency in shelves, but the lack of visibility and accessibility makes the mechanical search problem of revealing and extracting target objects difficult for robots. In this paper, we extend the lateral-access mechanical search problem to shelves with stacked items and introduce two novel policies -- Distribution Area Reduction for Stacked Scenes (DARSS) and Monte Carlo Tree Search for Stacked Scenes (MCTSSS) -- that use destacking and restacking actions. MCTSSS improves on prior lookahead policies by considering future states after each potential action. Experiments in 1200 simulated and 18 physical trials with a Fetch robot equipped with a blade and suction cup suggest that destacking and restacking actions can reveal the target object with 82--100% success in simulation and 66--100% in physical experiments, and are critical for searching densely packed shelves. In the simulation experiments, both policies outperform a baseline and achieve similar success rates but take more steps compared with an oracle policy that has full state information. In simulation and physical experiments, DARSS outperforms MCTSSS in median number of steps to reveal the target, but MCTSSS has a higher success rate in physical experiments, suggesting robustness to perception noise. View details
    Preview abstract We address a benchmark task in agile robotics: catching objects thrown at high-speed. This is a challenging task that involves tracking, intercepting, and cradling a thrown object with access only to visual observations of the object and the proprioceptive state of the robot, all within a fraction of a second. We present the relative merits of two fundamentally different solution strategies: (i) Model Predictive Control using accelerated constrained trajectory optimization, and (ii) Reinforcement Learning using zeroth-order optimization. We provide insights into various performance tradeoffs including sample efficiency, sim-to-real transfer, robustness to distribution shifts, and wholebody multimodality via extensive on-hardware experiments. We conclude with proposals on fusing “classical” and “learning-based” techniques for agile robot control. Videos of our experiments may be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/agile-catching. View details
    Bootstrap Your Own Skills: Learning to Solve New Tasks with Large Language Model Guidance
    Jesse Zhang
    Jiahui Zhang
    Karl Pertsch
    Ziyi Liu
    Xiang Ren
    Shao-Hua Sun
    Joseph Lim
    Conference on Robot Learning 2023 (2023)
    Preview abstract We propose BOSS, an approach that automatically learns to solve new long-horizon, complex, and meaningful tasks by autonomously growing a learned skill library. Prior work in reinforcement learning require expert supervision, in the form of demonstrations or rich reward functions, to learn long-horizon tasks. Instead, our approach BOSS (BOotStrapping your own Skills) learns to accomplish new tasks by performing “skill bootstrapping,” where an agent with a set of primitive skills interacts with the environment to practice new skills without receiving reward feedback for tasks outside of the initial skill set. This bootstrapping phase is guided by large language models (LLMs) that inform the agent of meaningful skills to chain together. Through this process, BOSS builds a wide range of complex and useful behaviors from a basic set of primitive skills. We demonstrate through experiments in realistic household environments that agents trained with our LLM-guided bootstrapping procedure outperform those trained with naive bootstrapping as well as prior unsupervised skill acquisition methods on zero-shot execution of unseen, long-horizon tasks in new environments View details
    CLARA: Classifying and Disambiguating User Commands for Reliable Interactive Robotic Agents
    Jeongeun Park
    Seungwon Lim
    Joonhyung Lee
    Sangbeom Park
    Sungjoon Choi
    Youngjae Yu
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2023) (to appear)
    Preview abstract In this paper, we focus on inferring whether the given user command is clear, ambiguous, or infeasible in the context of interactive robotic agents utilizing large language models (LLMs). To tackle this problem, we first present an uncertainty estimation method for LLMs to classify whether the command is certain (i.e., clear) or not (i.e., ambiguous or infeasible). Once the command is classified as uncertain, we further distinguish it between ambiguous or infeasible commands leveraging LLMs with situational aware few-shot prompting in a zero-shot manner. For ambiguous commands, we further disambiguate the command by interacting with users via question generation with LLMs. We believe that proper recognition of the given commands could lead to a decrease in malfunction and undesired actions of the robot, enhancing the reliability of interactive robot agents. To evaluate the proposed system, we present a dataset consisting pair of high-level commands, scene descriptions, and labels of command type (i.e., clear, ambiguous, or infeasible). We validate the proposed method on the collected dataset, pick-and-place tabletop simulation. Furthermore, we demonstrate the approach in a real-world human-robot interaction environment, i.e., handover scenarios. View details
    Safe Reinforcement Learning for Legged Locomotion
    Jimmy Yang
    Peter J. Ramadge
    Sehoon Ha
    International Conference on Robotics and Automation (2022) (to appear)
    Preview abstract Designing control policies for legged locomotion is complex due to underactuation and discrete contact dynamics. To deal with this complexity, applying reinforcement learning to learn a control policy in the real world is a promising approach. However, safety is a bottleneck when robots need to learn in the real world. In this paper, we propose a safe reinforcement learning framework that switches between a safe recovery policy and a learner policy. The safe recovery policy takes over the control when the learner policy violates safety constraints, and hands over the control back when there are no future safety violations. We design the safe recovery policy so that it ensures safety of legged locomotion while minimally interfering with the learning process. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the proposed framework and provide an upper bound on the task performance. We verify the proposed framework in three locomotion tasks on a simulated quadrupedal robot: catwalk, two-leg balance, and pacing. On average, our method achieves 48.6% fewer falls and comparable or better rewards than the baseline methods. View details
    A Protocol for Validating Social Navigation Policies
    Alexander Toshkov Toshev
    Anthony G. Francis
    Edward Lee
    Leila Takayama
    Soeren Pirk
    Xuesu Xiao
    Submission to SEANavBench 2022 Workshop (2022)
    Preview abstract Enabling socially acceptable behavior for situated agents is a major goal of recent robotics research. Robots not only need to operate safely around humans, but also in a way that their behavior complies to social expectations. A key challenge for developing socially-compliant polices is to measure the performance of the behavior they generate for the robot. Due to the enormous complexity of social behavior, metrics for measuring the success and failure of algorithms are difficult to obtain. In this paper, we introduce a protocol to establish a social navigation benchmark that focuses on defining a set of canonical social navigation scenarios and an in-situ metric for social scenarios based on questionnaires. Our protocol can be replicated verbatim or it can be used to define a social navigation benchmark for novel scenarios. Our goal is to introduce a protocol for benchmarking social scenarios that is homogeneous and comparable. View details
    Automatic Domain-Specific SoC Design for Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
    David Brooks
    Gu-Yeon Wei
    Kshitij Bhardwaj
    Paul Whatmough
    Srivatsan Krishnan
    Vijay Janapa Reddi
    Zishen Wan
    55th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture®, IEEE (2022) (to appear)
    Preview abstract Building domain-specific accelerators is becoming increasingly paramount to meet the high-performance requirements under stringent power and real-time constraints. However, emerging application domains like autonomous vehicles are complex systems, where the constraints extend beyond just the computing stack. Manually selecting and navigating the design space to design custom and efficient domain-specific SoCs (DSSoC) is tedious and expensive. As such, there is a need for automated DSSoC design methodologies. In this paper, we use agile and autonomous UAVs as a case study for understanding how to automate the design of domain-specific SoCs for autonomous vehicles. Architecting a UAV DSSoC requires considering parameters such as sensor rate, compute throughput, and other physical characteristics (e.g., payload weight, thrust-to-weight ratio) that affect overall performance. Iterating over the many component choices results in a combinatorial explosion of the number of possible combinations: from 10s of thousands to billions, depending on implementation details. To navigate the DSSoC design space efficiently, we introduce \emph{AutoPilot}, a systematic methodology for automatically designing DSSoC for autonomous UAVs. AutoPilot uses machine learning to navigate the large DSSoC design space and automatically select a combination of autonomy algorithm and hardware accelerator while considering the cross-product effect across different UAV components. \autop consistently outperforms general-purpose hardware selections like Xavier NX and Jetson TX2, as well as dedicated hardware accelerators built for autonomous UAVs. DSSoC designs generated by \autop increase the number of missions on average by up to 2.25x, 1.62x and 1.43x for nano, micro, and mini-UAVs, respectively, over baselines. We also discuss how \autop can be extended to other related autonomous vehicles using the same set of principles. View details
    Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances
    Alexander Herzog
    Alexander Toshkov Toshev
    Andy Zeng
    Anthony Brohan
    Brian Andrew Ichter
    Byron David
    Chelsea Finn
    Clayton Tan
    Diego Reyes
    Dmitry Kalashnikov
    Eric Victor Jang
    Jarek Liam Rettinghouse
    Jornell Lacanlale Quiambao
    Julian Ibarz
    Karol Hausman
    Kyle Alan Jeffrey
    Linda Luu
    Mengyuan Yan
    Michael Soogil Ahn
    Nicolas Sievers
    Noah Brown
    Omar Eduardo Escareno Cortes
    Peng Xu
    Peter Pastor Sampedro
    Rosario Jauregui Ruano
    Sally Augusta Jesmonth
    Sergey Levine
    Steve Xu
    Yao Lu
    Yevgen Chebotar
    Yuheng Kuang
    Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) (2022)
    Preview abstract Large language models can encode a wealth of semantic knowledge about the world. Such knowledge could in principle be extremely useful to robots aiming to act upon high-level, temporally extended instructions expressed in natural language. However, a significant weakness of language models is that they lack contextual grounding, which makes it difficult to leverage them for decision making within a given real-world context. For example, asking a language model to describe how to clean a spill might result in a reasonable narrative, but it may not be applicable to a particular agent, such as a robot, that needs to perform this task in a particular environment. We propose to provide this grounding by means of pretrained behaviors, which are used to condition the model to propose natural language actions that are both feasible and contextually appropriate. The robot can act as the language model’s “hands and eyes,” while the language model supplies high-level semantic knowledge about the task. We show how low-level tasks can be combined with large language models so that the language model provides high-level knowledge about the procedures for performing complex and temporally extended instructions, while value functions associated with these tasks provide the grounding necessary to connect this knowledge to a particular physical environment. We evaluate our method on a number of real-world robotic tasks, where we show that this approach is capable of executing long-horizon, abstract, natural-language tasks on a mobile manipulator. The project's website and the video can be found at \url{say-can.github.io}. View details
    Preview abstract Learning tabula rasa, that is without any prior knowledge, is the prevalent workflow in reinforcement learning (RL) research. However, RL systems, when applied to large-scale settings, rarely operate tabula rasa. Such large-scale systems undergo multiple design or algorithmic changes during their development cycle and use ad hoc approaches for incorporating these changes without re-training from scratch, which would have been prohibitively expensive. Additionally, the inefficiency of deep RL typically excludes researchers without access to industrial-scale resources from tackling computationally-demanding problems. To address these issues, we present reincarnating RL as an alternative workflow or class of problem settings, where prior computational work (e.g., learned policies) is reused or transferred between design iterations of an RL agent, or from one RL agent to another. As a step towards enabling reincarnating RL from any agent to any other agent, we focus on the specific setting of efficiently transferring an existing sub-optimal policy to a standalone value-based RL agent. We find that existing approaches fail in this setting and propose a simple algorithm to address their limitations. Equipped with this algorithm, we demonstrate reincarnating RL's gains over tabula rasa RL on Atari 2600 games, a challenging locomotion task, and the real-world problem of navigating stratospheric balloons. Overall, this work argues for an alternative approach to RL research, which we believe could significantly improve real-world RL adoption and help democratize it further. Open-sourced code and trained agents at View details