Daniel Wu

Shangqun Yu, Matthew En, Daniel Wu et al.

Opening heavy, self closing doors, especially those that require pulling remains a long standing challenge in robotics. Humans naturally employ both arms in a dexterous manner, rotating the handle, widening the gap, holding the door, switching arms when needed, and moving through while maintaining clearance. To replicate such behaviors, a robot must perform a long sequence of motions spanning multiple stages and interactions with different parts of the door. Traditional approaches rely on state machines that transition between manually defined stages (e.g., pulling after the knob is rotated, passing after the gap is sufficiently wide). While intuitive, these methods lack robustness, as hand crafted trajectories fail to generalize to the diversity of real world conditions without extensive engineering effort. Recent advances in imitation learning offer a scalable alternative, yet no existing visual action model has demonstrated simultaneous coordination of a nonholonomic base and dual arms for the complete door opening and passing task. In this paper, we tackle this complex, highly constrained problem using a diffusion based visuomotor control policy. Our results demonstrate that a single end to end policy can be learned to execute long horizon tasks requiring tight coordination between manipulation and locomotion. The resulting policy not only achieves a high success rate in opening and traversing damped pull doors but also demonstrates strong robustness to external disturbances capabilities that are difficult to realize with traditional methods.

Anubha Mahajan, Shreya Hegde, Ethan Shay et al.

In India, the majority of farmers are classified as small or marginal, making their livelihoods particularly vulnerable to economic losses due to market saturation and climate risks. Effective crop planning can significantly impact their expected income, yet existing decision support systems (DSS) often provide generic recommendations that fail to account for real-time market dynamics and the interactions among multiple farmers. In this paper, we evaluate the viability of three multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approaches for optimizing total farmer income and promoting fairness in crop planning: Independent Q-Learning (IQL), where each farmer acts independently without coordination, Agent-by-Agent (ABA), which sequentially optimizes each farmer's policy in relation to the others, and the Multi-agent Rollout Policy, which jointly optimizes all farmers' actions for global reward maximization. Our results demonstrate that while IQL offers computational efficiency with linear runtime, it struggles with coordination among agents, leading to lower total rewards and an unequal distribution of income. Conversely, the Multi-agent Rollout policy achieves the highest total rewards and promotes equitable income distribution among farmers but requires significantly more computational resources, making it less practical for large numbers of agents. ABA strikes a balance between runtime efficiency and reward optimization, offering reasonable total rewards with acceptable fairness and scalability. These findings highlight the importance of selecting appropriate MARL approaches in DSS to provide personalized and equitable crop planning recommendations, advancing the development of more adaptive and farmer-centric agricultural decision-making systems.