Abhishek Rathod

Alessandro Saviolo, Jonathan Frey, Abhishek Rathod et al.

Model-based control requires an accurate model of the system dynamics for precisely and safely controlling the robot in complex and dynamic environments. Moreover, in the presence of variations in the operating conditions, the model should be continuously refined to compensate for dynamics changes. In this paper, we present a self-supervised learning approach that actively models the dynamics of nonlinear robotic systems. We combine offline learning from past experience and online learning from current robot interaction with the unknown environment. These two ingredients enable a highly sample-efficient and adaptive learning process, capable of accurately inferring model dynamics in real-time even in operating regimes that greatly differ from the training distribution. Moreover, we design an uncertainty-aware model predictive controller that is heuristically conditioned to the aleatoric (data) uncertainty of the learned dynamics. This controller actively chooses the optimal control actions that (i) optimize the control performance and (ii) improve the efficiency of online learning sample collection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through a series of challenging real-world experiments using a quadrotor system. Our approach showcases high resilience and generalization capabilities by consistently adapting to unseen flight conditions, while it significantly outperforms classical and adaptive control baselines.

Gabriel Rodriguez, Henri Sayag, Abhishek Rathod et al.

Bidirectional thrust grants quadrotors a second equilibrium condition and increased control authority, expanding the envelope of possible aggressive maneuvers and enabling inverted flight, perching, and sensing. Prior geometric control approaches extend differential flatness through Hopf fibration-based attitude representations to support bidirectional thrust, but struggle with actuator saturation and motor reversal delay during inversions, requiring heuristic thrust posture scheduling and waypoint tuning. We propose a learning-based framework that modulates a constant reference trajectory to perform compact, position-constrained quadrotor inversions while remaining compatible with traditional trajectory generation and tracking across flight regimes. Separate policies are trained via reinforcement learning for nominal-to-inverted and inverted-to-nominal transitions. In JAX-based simulation, the proposed method achieves the lowest position deviation and settling time across all evaluated baselines, reducing position root mean square error (RMSE) by 32% and settling time by 57% relative to the strongest optimization-based baseline. Hardware experiments demonstrate successful inversion across multiple yaw configurations with position RMSE below 0.35m, and compatibility with downstream trajectory generation and control through circular flight in both regimes. Additionally, we provide an open-source implementation of the proposed framework.

Ángel Javier Alonso, Michael Kerber, Tung Lam et al.

A key property of the Delaunay filtration is that it is topologically (i.e., weakly) equivalent to the offset (union-of-balls) filtration. Recently, this filtration has been extended to point clouds equipped with an $\mathbb{R}$-valued function, yielding a computable 2-parameter filtration that satisfies an analogous weak equivalence. Motivated in part by the study of time-varying data, we introduce a 3-parameter extension of the Delaunay filtration for point clouds equipped with an $\mathbb{R}^2$-valued function, also satisfying an analogous weak equivalence. For a point cloud $X \subset \mathbb{R}^d$, our trifiltration has size $O\bigl(|X|^{\lceil(d+1)/2\rceil+1}\bigr)$. We present an algorithm that computes this trifiltration in time $O\bigl(|X|^{\lceil d/2\rceil+2}\bigr)$, together with an implementation. Our experiments demonstrate that implementation can handle thousands of points in $\mathbb{R}^3$, with memory growth that is nearly linear.

Jonathan Lee, Abhishek Rathod, Kshitij Goel et al.

This paper presents a reinforcement learning-based quadrotor navigation method that leverages efficient differentiable simulation, novel loss functions, and privileged information to navigate around large obstacles. Prior learning-based methods perform well in scenes that exhibit narrow obstacles, but struggle when the goal location is blocked by large walls or terrain. In contrast, the proposed method utilizes time-of-arrival (ToA) maps as privileged information and a yaw alignment loss to guide the robot around large obstacles. The policy is evaluated in photo-realistic simulation environments containing large obstacles, sharp corners, and dead-ends. Our approach achieves an 86% success rate and outperforms baseline strategies by 34%. We deploy the policy onboard a custom quadrotor in outdoor cluttered environments both during the day and night. The policy is validated across 20 flights, covering 589 meters without collisions at speeds up to 4 m/s.

Amritendu Dhar, Vijay Natarajan, Abhishek Rathod

Computing an optimal cycle in a given homology class, also referred to as the homology localization problem, is known to be an NP-hard problem in general. Furthermore, there is currently no known optimality criterion that localizes classes geometrically and admits a stability property under the setting of persistent homology. We present a geometric optimization of the cycles that is computable in polynomial time and is stable in an approximate sense. Tailoring our search criterion to different settings, we obtain various optimization problems like optimal homologous cycle, minimum homology basis, and minimum persistent homology basis. In practice, the (trivial) exact algorithm is computationally expensive despite having a worst case polynomial runtime. Therefore, we design approximation algorithms for the above problems and study their performance experimentally. These algorithms have reasonable runtimes for moderate sized datasets and the cycles computed by these algorithms are consistently of high quality as demonstrated via experiments on multiple datasets.