Jumping is essential for legged robots to traverse through difficult terrains. In this work, we propose a hierarchical framework that combines optimal control and reinforcement learning to learn continuous jumping motions for quadrupedal robots. The core of our framework is a stance controller, which combines a manually designed acceleration controller with a learned residual policy. As the acceleration controller warm starts policy for efficient training, the trained policy overcomes the limitation of the acceleration controller and improves the jumping stability. In addition, a low-level whole-body controller converts the body pose command from the stance controller to motor commands. After training in simulation, our framework can be deployed directly to the real robot, and perform versatile, continuous jumping motions, including omni-directional jumps at up to 50cm high, 60cm forward, and jump-turning at up to 90 degrees. Please visit our website for more results: https://sites.google.com/view/learning-to-jump.
Simulating vision-based tactile sensors enables learning models for contact-rich tasks when collecting real world data at scale can be prohibitive. However, modeling the optical response of the gel deformation as well as incorporating the dynamics of the contact makes sim2real challenging. Prior works have explored data augmentation, fine-tuning, or learning generative models to reduce the sim2real gap. In this work, we present the first method to leverage probabilistic diffusion models for capturing complex illumination changes from gel deformations. Our tactile diffusion model is able to generate realistic tactile images from simulated contact depth bridging the reality gap for vision-based tactile sensing. On real braille reading task with a DIGIT sensor, a classifier trained with our diffusion model achieves 75.74% accuracy outperforming classifiers trained with simulation and other approaches. Project page: https://github.com/carolinahiguera/Tactile-Diffusion
We study a new paradigm for sequential decision making, called offline Policy Learning from Observation (PLfO). Offline PLfO aims to learn policies using datasets with substandard qualities: 1) only a subset of trajectories is labeled with rewards, 2) labeled trajectories may not contain actions, 3) labeled trajectories may not be of high quality, and 4) the overall data may not have full coverage. Such imperfection is common in real-world learning scenarios, so offline PLfO encompasses many existing offline learning setups, including offline imitation learning (IL), ILfO, and reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we present a generic approach, called Modality-agnostic Adversarial Hypothesis Adaptation for Learning from Observations (MAHALO), for offline PLfO. Built upon the pessimism concept in offline RL, MAHALO optimizes the policy using a performance lower bound that accounts for uncertainty due to the dataset's insufficient converge. We implement this idea by adversarially training data-consistent critic and reward functions in policy optimization, which forces the learned policy to be robust to the data deficiency. We show that MAHALO consistently outperforms or matches specialized algorithms across a variety of offline PLfO tasks in theory and experiments.
Effective use of camera-based vision systems is essential for robust performance in autonomous off-road driving, particularly in the high-speed regime. Despite success in structured, on-road settings, current end-to-end approaches for scene prediction have yet to be successfully adapted for complex outdoor terrain. To this end, we present TerrainNet, a vision-based terrain perception system for semantic and geometric terrain prediction for aggressive, off-road navigation. The approach relies on several key insights and practical considerations for achieving reliable terrain modeling. The network includes a multi-headed output representation to capture fine- and coarse-grained terrain features necessary for estimating traversability. Accurate depth estimation is achieved using self-supervised depth completion with multi-view RGB and stereo inputs. Requirements for real-time performance and fast inference speeds are met using efficient, learned image feature projections. Furthermore, the model is trained on a large-scale, real-world off-road dataset collected across a variety of diverse outdoor environments. We show how TerrainNet can also be used for costmap prediction and provide a detailed framework for integration into a planning module. We demonstrate the performance of TerrainNet through extensive comparison to current state-of-the-art baselines for camera-only scene prediction. Finally, we showcase the effectiveness of integrating TerrainNet within a complete autonomous-driving stack by conducting a real-world vehicle test in a challenging off-road scenario.
We propose a novel model-based offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework, called Adversarial Model for Offline Reinforcement Learning (ARMOR), which can robustly learn policies to improve upon an arbitrary reference policy regardless of data coverage. ARMOR is designed to optimize policies for the worst-case performance relative to the reference policy through adversarially training a Markov decision process model. In theory, we prove that ARMOR, with a well-tuned hyperparameter, can compete with the best policy within data coverage when the reference policy is supported by the data. At the same time, ARMOR is robust to hyperparameter choices: the policy learned by ARMOR, with "any" admissible hyperparameter, would never degrade the performance of the reference policy, even when the reference policy is not covered by the dataset. To validate these properties in practice, we design a scalable implementation of ARMOR, which by adversarial training, can optimize policies without using model ensembles in contrast to typical model-based methods. We show that ARMOR achieves competent performance with both state-of-the-art offline model-free and model-based RL algorithms and can robustly improve the reference policy over various hyperparameter choices.
Sampling-based Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a flexible control framework that can reason about non-smooth dynamics and cost functions. Recently, significant work has focused on the use of machine learning to improve the performance of MPC, often through learning or fine-tuning the dynamics or cost function. In contrast, we focus on learning to optimize more effectively. In other words, to improve the update rule within MPC. We show that this can be particularly useful in sampling-based MPC, where we often wish to minimize the number of samples for computational reasons. Unfortunately, the cost of computational efficiency is a reduction in performance; fewer samples results in noisier updates. We show that we can contend with this noise by learning how to update the control distribution more effectively and make better use of the few samples that we have. Our learned controllers are trained via imitation learning to mimic an expert which has access to substantially more samples. We test the efficacy of our approach on multiple simulated robotics tasks in sample-constrained regimes and demonstrate that our approach can outperform a MPC controller with the same number of samples.
Sampling-based methods have become a cornerstone of contemporary approaches to Model Predictive Control (MPC), as they make no restrictions on the differentiability of the dynamics or cost function and are straightforward to parallelize. However, their efficacy is highly dependent on the quality of the sampling distribution itself, which is often assumed to be simple, like a Gaussian. This restriction can result in samples which are far from optimal, leading to poor performance. Recent work has explored improving the performance of MPC by sampling in a learned latent space of controls. However, these methods ultimately perform all MPC parameter updates and warm-starting between time steps in the control space. This requires us to rely on a number of heuristics for generating samples and updating the distribution and may lead to sub-optimal performance. Instead, we propose to carry out all operations in the latent space, allowing us to take full advantage of the learned distribution. Specifically, we frame the learning problem as bi-level optimization and show how to train the controller with backpropagation-through-time. By using a normalizing flow parameterization of the distribution, we can leverage its tractable density to avoid requiring differentiability of the dynamics and cost function. Finally, we evaluate the proposed approach on simulated robotics tasks and demonstrate its ability to surpass the performance of prior methods and scale better with a reduced number of samples.
We present Neural Contact Fields, a method that brings together neural fields and tactile sensing to address the problem of tracking extrinsic contact between object and environment. Knowing where the external contact occurs is a first step towards methods that can actively control it in facilitating downstream manipulation tasks. Prior work for localizing environmental contacts typically assume a contact type (e.g. point or line), does not capture contact/no-contact transitions, and only works with basic geometric-shaped objects. Neural Contact Fields are the first method that can track arbitrary multi-modal extrinsic contacts without making any assumptions about the contact type. Our key insight is to estimate the probability of contact for any 3D point in the latent space of object shapes, given vision-based tactile inputs that sense the local motion resulting from the external contact. In experiments, we find that Neural Contact Fields are able to localize multiple contact patches without making any assumptions about the geometry of the contact, and capture contact/no-contact transitions for known categories of objects with unseen shapes in unseen environment configurations. In addition to Neural Contact Fields, we also release our YCB-Extrinsic-Contact dataset of simulated extrinsic contact interactions to enable further research in this area. Project repository: https://github.com/carolinahiguera/NCF
The semantics of the environment, such as the terrain type and property, reveals important information for legged robots to adjust their behaviors. In this work, we present a framework that learns semantics-aware locomotion skills from perception for quadrupedal robots, such that the robot can traverse through complex offroad terrains with appropriate speeds and gaits using perception information. Due to the lack of high-fidelity outdoor simulation, our framework needs to be trained directly in the real world, which brings unique challenges in data efficiency and safety. To ensure sample efficiency, we pre-train the perception model with an off-road driving dataset. To avoid the risks of real-world policy exploration, we leverage human demonstration to train a speed policy that selects a desired forward speed from camera image. For maximum traversability, we pair the speed policy with a gait selector, which selects a robust locomotion gait for each forward speed. Using only 40 minutes of human demonstration data, our framework learns to adjust the speed and gait of the robot based on perceived terrain semantics, and enables the robot to walk over 6km without failure at close-to-optimal speed.
In this paper, we focus on the problem of integrating Energy-based Models (EBM) as guiding priors for motion optimization. EBMs are a set of neural networks that can represent expressive probability density distributions in terms of a Gibbs distribution parameterized by a suitable energy function. Due to their implicit nature, they can easily be integrated as optimization factors or as initial sampling distributions in the motion optimization problem, making them good candidates to integrate data-driven priors in the motion optimization problem. In this work, we present a set of required modeling and algorithmic choices to adapt EBMs into motion optimization. We investigate the benefit of including additional regularizers in the learning of the EBMs to use them with gradient-based optimizers and we present a set of EBM architectures to learn generalizable distributions for manipulation tasks. We present multiple cases in which the EBM could be integrated for motion optimization and evaluate the performance of learned EBMs as guiding priors for both simulated and real robot experiments.