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arXiv2023

Learning robotic milling strategies based on passive variable operational space interaction control

This paper addresses the problem of robotic cutting during disassembly of products for materials separation and recycling. Waste handling applications differ from milling in manufacturing processes, as they engender considerable variety and uncertainty in the parameters (e.g. hardness) of materials which the robot must cut. To address this challenge, we propose a learning-based approach incorporating elements of interaction control, in which the robot can adapt key parameters, such as feed rate, depth of cut, and mechanical compliance during task execution. We show how a mathematical model of cutting mechanics, embedded in a simulation environment, can be used to rapidly train the system without needing large amounts of data from physical cutting trials. The simulation approach was validated on a real robot setup based on four case study materials with varying structural and mechanical properties. We demonstrate the proposed method minimises process force and path deviations to a level similar to offline optimal planning methods, while the average time to complete a cutting task is within 25% of the optimum, at the expense of reduced volume of material removed per pass. A key advantage of our approach over similar works is that no prior knowledge about the material is required.

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arXiv2026

Human2Dex: Dexterous Robot Learning from Wrist-Centric Human Demonstrations

Collecting dexterous manipulation demonstrations for each robot hand requires repeated task-specific data acquisition. We ask whether one shared corpus of natural human demonstrations can instead serve as a reusable data interface for different dexterous hands, without collecting task demonstrations on each target robot. We present Human2Dex, a wrist-centric human demonstration interface that separates shared human observation and motion semantics from embodiment-specific execution. It aligns observations through local hand-appearance adaptation and a shared 21-point hand representation with consistent structural semantics across human and robot observations. It constructs executable supervision by retargeting fused human hand motion to each target hand, and introduces the Grasp-Pocket Interaction Representation (GPIR) to express tracked objects relative to a hand-centered Functional Grasp Pocket. The corpus is converted into separate training sets for Linker O6 and Wuji, while action labels, normalization, training, and diffusion-policy checkpoints remain hand-specific. Across six real-world tasks, Human2Dex achieves 109/120 (90.8%) successes on Linker O6 and 97/120 (80.8%) on Wuji. Across both hands, Human-Raw achieves 63/240 (26.3%) successes, whereas the complete Human2Dex configuration achieves 206/240 (85.8%). These results support the use of wrist-centric human demonstrations as a reusable interface across calibrated dexterous hands while retaining embodiment-specific policy learning. The project website is publicly available at https://human2dex.pages.dev/.

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arXiv2021

Isaac Gym: High Performance GPU-Based Physics Simulation For Robot Learning

Isaac Gym offers a high performance learning platform to train policies for wide variety of robotics tasks directly on GPU. Both physics simulation and the neural network policy training reside on GPU and communicate by directly passing data from physics buffers to PyTorch tensors without ever going through any CPU bottlenecks. This leads to blazing fast training times for complex robotics tasks on a single GPU with 2-3 orders of magnitude improvements compared to conventional RL training that uses a CPU based simulator and GPU for neural networks. We host the results and videos at \url{https://sites.google.com/view/isaacgym-nvidia} and isaac gym can be downloaded at \url{https://developer.nvidia.com/isaac-gym}.

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arXiv2020

Self learning robot using real-time neural networks

With the advancements in high volume, low precision computational technology and applied research on cognitive artificially intelligent heuristic systems, machine learning solutions through neural networks with real-time learning has seen an immense interest in the research community as well the industry. This paper involves research, development and experimental analysis of a neural network implemented on a robot with an arm through which evolves to learn to walk in a straight line or as required. The neural network learns using the algorithms of Gradient Descent and Backpropagation. Both the implementation and training of the neural network is done locally on the robot on a raspberry pi 3 so that its learning process is completely independent. The neural network is first tested on a custom simulator developed on MATLAB and then implemented on the raspberry computer. Data at each generation of the evolving network is stored, and analysis both mathematical and graphical is done on the data. Impact of factors like the learning rate and error tolerance on the learning process and final output is analyzed.

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arXiv2021

Towards Exploiting Geometry and Time for Fast Off-Distribution Adaptation in Multi-Task Robot Learning

We explore possible methods for multi-task transfer learning which seek to exploit the shared physical structure of robotics tasks. Specifically, we train policies for a base set of pre-training tasks, then experiment with adapting to new off-distribution tasks, using simple architectural approaches for re-using these policies as black-box priors. These approaches include learning an alignment of either the observation space or action space from a base to a target task to exploit rigid body structure, and methods for learning a time-domain switching policy across base tasks which solves the target task, to exploit temporal coherence. We find that combining low-complexity target policy classes, base policies as black-box priors, and simple optimization algorithms allows us to acquire new tasks outside the base task distribution, using small amounts of offline training data.

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arXiv2018

Learning Robotic Assembly from CAD

In this work, motivated by recent manufacturing trends, we investigate autonomous robotic assembly. Industrial assembly tasks require contact-rich manipulation skills, which are challenging to acquire using classical control and motion planning approaches. Consequently, robot controllers for assembly domains are presently engineered to solve a particular task, and cannot easily handle variations in the product or environment. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for autonomously acquiring robot skills that involve contact-rich dynamics. However, RL relies on random exploration for learning a control policy, which requires many robot executions, and often gets trapped in locally suboptimal solutions. Instead, we posit that prior knowledge, when available, can improve RL performance. We exploit the fact that in modern assembly domains, geometric information about the task is readily available via the CAD design files. We propose to leverage this prior knowledge by guiding RL along a geometric motion plan, calculated using the CAD data. We show that our approach effectively improves over traditional control approaches for tracking the motion plan, and can solve assembly tasks that require high precision, even without accurate state estimation. In addition, we propose a neural network architecture that can learn to track the motion plan, and generalize the assembly controller to changes in the object positions.

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arXiv2026

Memorize, Adapt, Ignore: Diagnosing Robot Learning Mechanisms under Training Data Variation

Training data variation, whether through designing a domain randomization (DR) scheme in simulation or curating demonstrations for imitation learning, is a primary lever for improving the robustness of robotic manipulation policies. Yet its underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood, and practitioners typically select randomization parameters through expensive trial and error. We investigate these mechanisms through a series of case studies, randomizing object size, color, and type as well as scene lighting and linguistic prompts across settings including pick-and-place RL in ManiSkill and fine-tuning of vision-language-action (VLA) models on LIBERO and RoboTwin. We examine both model behavior and internal representations, using the empirical neural tangent kernel (NTK) as our primary diagnostic tool. We show that the NTK distinguishes a shift in the internal learning mechanism from \textit{memorizing} different situations with insufficient variation (e.g.\ learning what to do for a large cube, and what to do for a small cube) to \textit{adapting} to the situation at hand with sufficient variation. An NTK-based signal-to-noise ratio also helps distinguish when policies have learned to \emph{ignore} task-irrelevant factors (e.g.\ treating blue and red cubes identically, instead of learning a blue sub-policy and a red sub-policy). We use these diagnostics to develop practical guidance for designing DR schemes, selecting models, and detecting shortcut learning. We further compare different kinds of representations and validate our findings with real-world hardware experiments using ACT-based imitation learning.

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arXiv2024

GNFactor: Multi-Task Real Robot Learning with Generalizable Neural Feature Fields

It is a long-standing problem in robotics to develop agents capable of executing diverse manipulation tasks from visual observations in unstructured real-world environments. To achieve this goal, the robot needs to have a comprehensive understanding of the 3D structure and semantics of the scene. In this work, we present $\textbf{GNFactor}$, a visual behavior cloning agent for multi-task robotic manipulation with $\textbf{G}$eneralizable $\textbf{N}$eural feature $\textbf{F}$ields. GNFactor jointly optimizes a generalizable neural field (GNF) as a reconstruction module and a Perceiver Transformer as a decision-making module, leveraging a shared deep 3D voxel representation. To incorporate semantics in 3D, the reconstruction module utilizes a vision-language foundation model ($\textit{e.g.}$, Stable Diffusion) to distill rich semantic information into the deep 3D voxel. We evaluate GNFactor on 3 real robot tasks and perform detailed ablations on 10 RLBench tasks with a limited number of demonstrations. We observe a substantial improvement of GNFactor over current state-of-the-art methods in seen and unseen tasks, demonstrating the strong generalization ability of GNFactor. Our project website is https://yanjieze.com/GNFactor/ .

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arXiv2025

Krysalis Hand: A Lightweight, High-Payload, 18-DoF Anthropomorphic End-Effector for Robotic Learning and Dexterous Manipulation

This paper presents the Krysalis Hand, a five-finger robotic end-effector that combines a lightweight design, high payload capacity, and a high number of degrees of freedom (DoF) to enable dexterous manipulation in both industrial and research settings. This design integrates the actuators within the hand while maintaining an anthropomorphic form. Each finger joint features a self-locking mechanism that allows the hand to sustain large external forces without active motor engagement. This approach shifts the payload limitation from the motor strength to the mechanical strength of the hand, allowing the use of smaller, more cost-effective motors. With 18 DoF and weighing only 790 grams, the Krysalis Hand delivers an active squeezing force of 10 N per finger and supports a passive payload capacity exceeding 10 lbs. These characteristics make Krysalis Hand one of the lightest, strongest, and most dexterous robotic end-effectors of its kind. Experimental evaluations validate its ability to perform intricate manipulation tasks and handle heavy payloads, underscoring its potential for industrial applications as well as academic research. All code related to the Krysalis Hand, including control and teleoperation, is available on the project GitHub repository: https://github.com/Soltanilara/Krysalis_Hand

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arXiv2026

Robot Learning to Communicate through Projected Visual Abstractions

Humans routinely communicate through abstractions of their bodies, including shadows, silhouettes, and reflections. Yet robots remain largely confined to expressing themselves through their physical morphology. Enabling robots to communicate through such projected visual abstractions requires reasoning not only about bodily motion but also about how that motion is transformed into an external representation perceived by an observer. Among these abstractions, shadows provide a particularly compelling example because they emerge directly from the robot's embodiment while remaining visually distinct from the body itself. Here, we present a robotic system capable of dynamic shadow expression using a 21-degree-of-freedom dexterous hand with compliant soft skin and a learned shadow self-model. The soft-skinned embodiment reduces light leakage to produce visually continuous silhouettes, while the differentiable self-model learns the mapping between hand configurations and projected shadow appearance through task-agnostic self-exploration. Given a target shadow image or video, the robot optimizes its hand configurations through gradient-based search over 1 the learned self-model and refines the solution through collision-aware simulation to obtain physically feasible motions. For dynamic shadow performance, we further introduce expressive-region objectives, temporal smoothness regularization, and keyframe-based optimization to preserve visually important motion cues while reducing optimization complexity. We demonstrate robotic shadow expression across sign-language gestures, hand-shadow puppetry, and animal motion imitation in both simulation and physical experiments. These results establish a framework for enabling robots to manipulate projected visual abstractions of themselves for communication and visual storytelling.

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arXiv2024

ARCap: Collecting High-quality Human Demonstrations for Robot Learning with Augmented Reality Feedback

Recent progress in imitation learning from human demonstrations has shown promising results in teaching robots manipulation skills. To further scale up training datasets, recent works start to use portable data collection devices without the need for physical robot hardware. However, due to the absence of on-robot feedback during data collection, the data quality depends heavily on user expertise, and many devices are limited to specific robot embodiments. We propose ARCap, a portable data collection system that provides visual feedback through augmented reality (AR) and haptic warnings to guide users in collecting high-quality demonstrations. Through extensive user studies, we show that ARCap enables novice users to collect robot-executable data that matches robot kinematics and avoids collisions with the scenes. With data collected from ARCap, robots can perform challenging tasks, such as manipulation in cluttered environments and long-horizon cross-embodiment manipulation. ARCap is fully open-source and easy to calibrate; all components are built from off-the-shelf products. More details and results can be found on our website: https://stanford-tml.github.io/ARCap

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arXiv2024

Efficient Robot Learning for Perception and Mapping

Holistic scene understanding poses a fundamental contribution to the autonomous operation of a robotic agent in its environment. Key ingredients include a well-defined representation of the surroundings to capture its spatial structure as well as assigning semantic meaning while delineating individual objects. Classic components from the toolbox of roboticists to address these tasks are simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and panoptic segmentation. Although recent methods demonstrate impressive advances, mostly due to employing deep learning, they commonly utilize in-domain training on large datasets. Since following such a paradigm substantially limits their real-world application, my research investigates how to minimize human effort in deploying perception-based robotic systems to previously unseen environments. In particular, I focus on leveraging continual learning and reducing human annotations for efficient learning. An overview of my work can be found at https://vniclas.github.io.

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arXiv2023

Primitive Skill-based Robot Learning from Human Evaluative Feedback

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms face significant challenges when dealing with long-horizon robot manipulation tasks in real-world environments due to sample inefficiency and safety issues. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel framework, SEED, which leverages two approaches: reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and primitive skill-based reinforcement learning. Both approaches are particularly effective in addressing sparse reward issues and the complexities involved in long-horizon tasks. By combining them, SEED reduces the human effort required in RLHF and increases safety in training robot manipulation with RL in real-world settings. Additionally, parameterized skills provide a clear view of the agent's high-level intentions, allowing humans to evaluate skill choices before they are executed. This feature makes the training process even safer and more efficient. To evaluate the performance of SEED, we conducted extensive experiments on five manipulation tasks with varying levels of complexity. Our results show that SEED significantly outperforms state-of-the-art RL algorithms in sample efficiency and safety. In addition, SEED also exhibits a substantial reduction of human effort compared to other RLHF methods. Further details and video results can be found at https://seediros23.github.io/.

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arXiv2025

UAIbot: Beginner-friendly web-based simulator for interactive robotics learning and research

This paper presents UAIbot, a free and open-source web-based robotics simulator designed to address the educational and research challenges conventional simulation platforms generally face. The Python and JavaScript interfaces of UAIbot enable accessible hands-on learning experiences without cumbersome installations. By allowing users to explore fundamental mathematical and physical principles interactively, ranging from manipulator kinematics to pedestrian flow dynamics, UAIbot provides an effective tool for deepening student understanding, facilitating rapid experimentation, and enhancing research dissemination.

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arXiv2026

P3: Probabilistic Policy Propagation for Stable VAE-Based Robot Learning

Variational Autoencoders are widely used to encode high-dimensional and noisy observations in robotics. However, their stochastic latent creates a mismatch with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO): an effective policy marginalizes over the latent distribution, whereas former implementations estimate its probability ratio and KL divergence using only one latent sample. We identify a fundamental but overlooked theoretical cause: naive single-sample approximations in stochastic latent space induce significant variance and bias in the surrogate loss. To address this, we introduce P^3 (Probabilistic Policy Propagation), a distribution-aware optimization framework for VAE-based policies. $P^3$ couples moment-based probabilistic method for stable and efficient learning with sampling-based calibration for robust policy behavior under latent uncertainty. In our experiments, P^3 boosts data efficiency from 64.6% to >96%, reduces convergence steps by >20%. Furthermore, P^3 is evaluated on challenging humanoid parkour tasks and shows an effective foundation for VAE-based PPO. Code is available at https://github.com/ylyem9x/P3_Open.

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arXiv2022

Learning robot motor skills with mixed reality

Mixed Reality (MR) has recently shown great success as an intuitive interface for enabling end-users to teach robots. Related works have used MR interfaces to communicate robot intents and beliefs to a co-located human, as well as developed algorithms for taking multi-modal human input and learning complex motor behaviors. Even with these successes, enabling end-users to teach robots complex motor tasks still poses a challenge because end-user communication is highly task dependent and world knowledge is highly varied. We propose a learning framework where end-users teach robots a) motion demonstrations, b) task constraints, c) planning representations, and d) object information, all of which are integrated into a single motor skill learning framework based on Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs). We hypothesize that conveying this world knowledge will be intuitive with an MR interface, and that a sample-efficient motor skill learning framework which incorporates varied modalities of world knowledge will enable robots to effectively solve complex tasks.

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arXiv2025

Beyond Predefined Actions: Integrating Behavior Trees and Dynamic Movement Primitives for Robot Learning from Demonstration

Interpretable policy representations like Behavior Trees (BTs) and Dynamic Motion Primitives (DMPs) enable robot skill transfer from human demonstrations, but each faces limitations: BTs require expert-crafted low-level actions, while DMPs lack high-level task logic. We address these limitations by integrating DMP controllers into a BT framework, jointly learning the BT structure and DMP actions from single demonstrations, thereby removing the need for predefined actions. Additionally, by combining BT decision logic with DMP motion generation, our method enhances policy interpretability, modularity, and adaptability for autonomous systems. Our approach readily affords both learning to replicate low-level motions and combining partial demonstrations into a coherent and easy-to-modify overall policy.

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arXiv2026

Real2Sem2Real: 3D Semantic Augmentations for Robot Learning from a Single Human RGB Demonstration

Human video scales easily and does not need robot hardware, but existing methods require depth sensing, overlay the robot onto 2D video, or generate data only for the demonstrated objects. We present Real2Sem2Real (R2Sem2R), a real-to-semantic-to-real pipeline that turns one monocular RGB video of a human demonstration into thousands of robot demonstrations across the semantic object instances of a category. R2Sem2R tracks the SE(3) pose of each object with DINOv3-distilled Gaussian splats, outperforming existing methods and FoundationPose with estimated metric depth. R2Sem2R then aligns digital cousins, each generated from one or a few photographs, to the demonstrated objects with a semantic alignment. This alignment matches whole objects and the functional regions of target objects, such as a coffee machine's tray. R2Sem2R maps the human hand to a feasible robot grasp that extends to the cousins. Robot demonstrations are generated either in IsaacSim, for photorealistic rendering, or MuJoCo, for contact physics, and R2Sem2R can generate over 2,000 episodes in about two hours. On two real robots and four tasks, we train a vision-language-action policy on data from one human video per task, and policies trained on our data match or exceed policies trained on teleoperation across diverse object instances. The project page is available at https://real2sem2real.github.io/.

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