Dieter Fox

The increasing affordability of robot hardware is accelerating the integration of robots into everyday activities. However, training a robot to automate a task typically requires physical robots and expensive demonstration data from trained human annotators. Consequently, only those with access to physical robots produce demonstrations to train robots. To mitigate this issue, we introduce EVE, an iOS app that enables everyday users to train robots using intuitive augmented reality visualizations without needing a physical robot. With EVE, users can collect demonstrations by specifying waypoints with their hands, visually inspecting the environment for obstacles, modifying existing waypoints, and verifying collected trajectories. In a user study (, ) consisting of three common tabletop tasks, EVE outperformed three state-of-the-art interfaces in success rate and was comparable to kinesthetic teaching-physically moving a real robot-in completion time, usability, motion intent communication, enjoyment, and preference (). We conclude by enumerating limitations and design considerations for future AR-based demonstration collection systems for robotics.

Apparatuses, systems, and techniques to infer a sequence of actions to perform using one or more neural networks trained, at least in part, by optimizing a probability distribution function using a cost function, wherein the probability distribution represents different sequences of actions that can be performed. In at least one embodiment, a model predictive control problem is formulated as a Bayesian inference task to infer a set of solutions.

Apparatuses, systems, and techniques to perform collision-free motion generation (eg, to operate a real-world or virtual robot). In at least one embodiment, at least a portion of the collision-free motion generation is performed in parallel.

Systems and techniques are described related to training one or more machine learning models for use in control of a robot. In at least one embodiment, one or more machine learning models are trained based at least on simulations of the robot and renderings of such simulations—which may be performed using one or more ray tracing algorithms, operations, or techniques.

Apparatuses, systems, and techniques determine a set of grasp poses that would allow a robot to successfully grasp an object that is proximate to at least one additional object. In at least one embodiment, the set of grasp poses is modified based on a determination that at least one of the grasp poses in the set of grasp poses would interfere with at least one additional object that is proximate to the object.

In recent years, deep reinforcement learning (RL) has shown its effectiveness in solving complex continuous control tasks like locomotion and dexterous manipulation. However, this comes at the cost of an enormous amount of experience required for training, exacerbated by the sensitivity of learning efficiency and the policy performance to hyperparameter selection, which often requires numerous trials of time-consuming experiments. This work introduces a Population-Based Reinforcement Learning (PBRL) approach that exploits a GPU-accelerated physics simulator to enhance the exploration capabilities of RL by concurrently training multiple policies in parallel. The PBRL framework is applied to three state-of-the-art RL algorithms -- PPO, SAC, and DDPG -- dynamically adjusting hyperparameters based on the performance of learning agents. The experiments are performed on four challenging tasks in Isaac Gym -- Anymal Terrain, Shadow Hand, Humanoid, Franka Nut Pick -- by analyzing the effect of population size and mutation mechanisms for hyperparameters. The results show that PBRL agents achieve superior performance, in terms of cumulative reward, compared to non-evolutionary baseline agents. The trained agents are finally deployed in the real world for a Franka Nut Pick} task, demonstrating successful sim-to-real transfer. Code and videos of the learned policies are available on our project website.

Apparatuses, systems, and techniques to generate and select grasp proposals. In at least one embodiment, grasp proposals are generated and selected using one or more neural networks, based on, for example, a latent code corresponding to an object.

Apparatuses, systems, and techniques are presented to identify one or more objects. In at least one embodiment, one or more neural networks can be used to identify one or more objects based, at least in part, on one or more descriptors of one or more segments of the one or more objects.