Alex Bewley

Authored Publications
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    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
    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
    Preview abstract Sim-to-real transfer is a powerful paradigm for robotic reinforcement learning. The ability to train policies in simulation enables safe exploration and large-scale data collection quickly at low cost. However, prior works in sim-to-real transfer of robotic policies typically do not involve any human-robot interaction because accurately simulating human behavior is an open problem. In this work, our goal is to leverage the power of simulation to train robotic policies that are proficient at interacting with humans upon deployment. This presents a chicken-and-egg problem --- how to gather examples of a human interacting with a physical robot so as to model human behavior in simulation without already having a robot that is able to interact with a human? Our proposed method, Iterative-Sim-to-Real i-S2R), attempts to address this. i-S2R bootstraps from a simple model of human behavior and alternates between training in simulation and deploying in the real world. In each iteration, both the human behavior model and the policy are improved. We evaluate our method on a real world robotic table tennis setting, where the objective for the robot is to play cooperatively with a human player for as long as possible. Table tennis is a high-speed, dynamic task that requires the two players to react quickly to each other’s moves, making for a challenging test bed for research on human-robot interaction. We present results on a physical industrial robotic arm that is able to cooperatively play table tennis against human players, achieving rallies of 22 successive hits on average and 150 at best. Further, for 80% of players, rally lengths are 70% to 175% longer compared to the sim-to-real (S2R) baseline. View details
    Preview abstract This paper presents a novel 3D object detection framework that processes LiDAR data directly on a representation of the sensor's native range images. When operating in the range image view, one faces learning challenges, including occlusion and considerable scale variation, limiting the obtainable accuracy. To address these challenges, a range-conditioned dilated block (RCD) is proposed to dynamically adjust a continuous dilation rate as a function of the measured range, achieving scale invariance. Furthermore, soft range gating helps mitigate the effect of occlusion. An end-to-end trained box-refinement network brings additional performance improvements in occluded areas, and produces more accurate bounding box predictions. On the Waymo Open Dataset, currently the largest and most diverse publicly released autonomous driving dataset, our improved range-based detector outperforms state of the art at long range detection. Our framework is superior to prior multiview, voxel-based methods over all ranges, setting a new baseline for range-based 3D detection on this large scale public dataset. View details