Qingfeng Yao

Qingfeng Yao, Jilong Wan, Shuyu Yang et al.

Due to their ability to adapt to different terrains, quadruped robots have drawn much attention in the research field of robot learning. Legged mobile manipulation, where a quadruped robot is equipped with a robotic arm, can greatly enhance the performance of the robot in diverse manipulation tasks. Several prior works have investigated legged mobile manipulation from the viewpoint of control theory. However, modeling a unified structure for various robotic arms and quadruped robots is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a unified framework disturbance predictive control where a reinforcement learning scheme with a latent dynamic adapter is embedded into our proposed low-level controller. Our method can adapt well to various types of robotic arms with a few random motion samples and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Qingfeng Yao, Jilong Wang, Shuyu Yang et al.

The essence of quadrupeds' movements is the movement of the center of gravity, which has a pattern in the action of quadrupeds. However, the gait motion planning of the quadruped robot is time-consuming. Animals in nature can provide a large amount of gait information for robots to learn and imitate. Common methods learn animal posture with a motion capture system or numerous motion data points. In this paper, we propose a video imitation adaptation network (VIAN) that can imitate the action of animals and adapt it to the robot from a few seconds of video. The deep learning model extracts key points during animal motion from videos. The VIAN eliminates noise and extracts key information of motion with a motion adaptor, and then applies the extracted movements function as the motion pattern into deep reinforcement learning (DRL). To ensure similarity between the learning result and the animal motion in the video, we introduce rewards that are based on the consistency of the motion. DRL explores and learns to maintain balance from movement patterns from videos, imitates the action of animals, and eventually, allows the model to learn the gait or skills from short motion videos of different animals and to transfer the motion pattern to the real robot.

Qingfeng Yao, Jilong Wang, Shuyu Yang

Deep reinforcement learning has shown its advantages in real-time decision-making based on the state of the agent. In this stage, we solved the task of using a real robot to manipulate the cube to a given trajectory. The task is broken down into different procedures and we propose a hierarchical structure, the high-level deep reinforcement learning model selects appropriate contact positions and the low-level control module performs the position control under the corresponding trajectory. Our framework reduces the disadvantage of low sample efficiency of deep reinforcement learning and lacking adaptability of traditional robot control methods. Our algorithm is trained in simulation and migrated to reality without fine-tuning. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our method both simulation and reality. Our code and video can be found at https://github.com/42jaylonw/RRC2021ThreeWolves and https://youtu.be/Jr176xsn9wg.

Stefan Bauer, Felix Widmaier, Manuel Wüthrich et al.

Dexterous manipulation remains an open problem in robotics. To coordinate efforts of the research community towards tackling this problem, we propose a shared benchmark. We designed and built robotic platforms that are hosted at MPI for Intelligent Systems and can be accessed remotely. Each platform consists of three robotic fingers that are capable of dexterous object manipulation. Users are able to control the platforms remotely by submitting code that is executed automatically, akin to a computational cluster. Using this setup, i) we host robotics competitions, where teams from anywhere in the world access our platforms to tackle challenging tasks ii) we publish the datasets collected during these competitions (consisting of hundreds of robot hours), and iii) we give researchers access to these platforms for their own projects.