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arXiv2020

Cooperative Control of Mobile Robots with Stackelberg Learning

Multi-robot cooperation requires agents to make decisions that are consistent with the shared goal without disregarding action-specific preferences that might arise from asymmetry in capabilities and individual objectives. To accomplish this goal, we propose a method named SLiCC: Stackelberg Learning in Cooperative Control. SLiCC models the problem as a partially observable stochastic game composed of Stackelberg bimatrix games, and uses deep reinforcement learning to obtain the payoff matrices associated with these games. Appropriate cooperative actions are then selected with the derived Stackelberg equilibria. Using a bi-robot cooperative object transportation problem, we validate the performance of SLiCC against centralized multi-agent Q-learning and demonstrate that SLiCC achieves better combined utility.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

ForceMimic: Force-Centric Imitation Learning with Force-Motion Capture System for Contact-Rich Manipulation

In most contact-rich manipulation tasks, humans apply time-varying forces to the target object, compensating for inaccuracies in the vision-guided hand trajectory. However, current robot learning algorithms primarily focus on trajectory-based policy, with limited attention given to learning force-related skills. To address this limitation, we introduce ForceMimic, a force-centric robot learning system, providing a natural, force-aware and robot-free robotic demonstration collection system, along with a hybrid force-motion imitation learning algorithm for robust contact-rich manipulation. Using the proposed ForceCapture system, an operator can peel a zucchini in 5 minutes, while force-feedback teleoperation takes over 13 minutes and struggles with task completion. With the collected data, we propose HybridIL to train a force-centric imitation learning model, equipped with hybrid force-position control primitive to fit the predicted wrench-position parameters during robot execution. Experiments demonstrate that our approach enables the model to learn a more robust policy under the contact-rich task of vegetable peeling, increasing the success rates by 54.5% relatively compared to state-ofthe-art pure-vision-based imitation learning. Hardware, code, data and more results can be found on the project website at https://forcemimic.github.io.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

$π_0$: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control

Robot learning holds tremendous promise to unlock the full potential of flexible, general, and dexterous robot systems, as well as to address some of the deepest questions in artificial intelligence. However, bringing robot learning to the level of generality required for effective real-world systems faces major obstacles in terms of data, generalization, and robustness. In this paper, we discuss how generalist robot policies (i.e., robot foundation models) can address these challenges, and how we can design effective generalist robot policies for complex and highly dexterous tasks. We propose a novel flow matching architecture built on top of a pre-trained vision-language model (VLM) to inherit Internet-scale semantic knowledge. We then discuss how this model can be trained on a large and diverse dataset from multiple dexterous robot platforms, including single-arm robots, dual-arm robots, and mobile manipulators. We evaluate our model in terms of its ability to perform tasks in zero shot after pre-training, follow language instructions from people and from a high-level VLM policy, and its ability to acquire new skills via fine-tuning. Our results cover a wide variety of tasks, such as laundry folding, table cleaning, and assembling boxes.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

A Real-World Quadrupedal Locomotion Benchmark for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Online reinforcement learning (RL) methods are often data-inefficient or unreliable, making them difficult to train on real robotic hardware, especially quadruped robots. Learning robotic tasks from pre-collected data is a promising direction. Meanwhile, agile and stable legged robotic locomotion remains an open question in their general form. Offline reinforcement learning (ORL) has the potential to make breakthroughs in this challenging field, but its current bottleneck lies in the lack of diverse datasets for challenging realistic tasks. To facilitate the development of ORL, we benchmarked 11 ORL algorithms in the realistic quadrupedal locomotion dataset. Such dataset is collected by the classic model predictive control (MPC) method, rather than the model-free online RL method commonly used by previous benchmarks. Extensive experimental results show that the best-performing ORL algorithms can achieve competitive performance compared with the model-free RL, and even surpass it in some tasks. However, there is still a gap between the learning-based methods and MPC, especially in terms of stability and rapid adaptation. Our proposed benchmark will serve as a development platform for testing and evaluating the performance of ORL algorithms in real-world legged locomotion tasks.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2018

Beyond imitation: Zero-shot task transfer on robots by learning concepts as cognitive programs

Humans can infer concepts from image pairs and apply those in the physical world in a completely different setting, enabling tasks like IKEA assembly from diagrams. If robots could represent and infer high-level concepts, it would significantly improve their ability to understand our intent and to transfer tasks between different environments. To that end, we introduce a computational framework that replicates aspects of human concept learning. Concepts are represented as programs on a novel computer architecture consisting of a visual perception system, working memory, and action controller. The instruction set of this "cognitive computer" has commands for parsing a visual scene, directing gaze and attention, imagining new objects, manipulating the contents of a visual working memory, and controlling arm movement. Inferring a concept corresponds to inducing a program that can transform the input to the output. Some concepts require the use of imagination and recursion. Previously learned concepts simplify the learning of subsequent more elaborate concepts, and create a hierarchy of abstractions. We demonstrate how a robot can use these abstractions to interpret novel concepts presented to it as schematic images, and then apply those concepts in dramatically different situations. By bringing cognitive science ideas on mental imagery, perceptual symbols, embodied cognition, and deictic mechanisms into the realm of machine learning, our work brings us closer to the goal of building robots that have interpretable representations and commonsense.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Enforcing the consensus between Trajectory Optimization and Policy Learning for precise robot control

Reinforcement learning (RL) and trajectory optimization (TO) present strong complementary advantages. On one hand, RL approaches are able to learn global control policies directly from data, but generally require large sample sizes to properly converge towards feasible policies. On the other hand, TO methods are able to exploit gradient-based information extracted from simulators to quickly converge towards a locally optimal control trajectory which is only valid within the vicinity of the solution. Over the past decade, several approaches have aimed to adequately combine the two classes of methods in order to obtain the best of both worlds. Following on from this line of research, we propose several improvements on top of these approaches to learn global control policies quicker, notably by leveraging sensitivity information stemming from TO methods via Sobolev learning, and augmented Lagrangian techniques to enforce the consensus between TO and policy learning. We evaluate the benefits of these improvements on various classical tasks in robotics through comparison with existing approaches in the literature.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

InCoRo: In-Context Learning for Robotics Control with Feedback Loops

One of the challenges in robotics is to enable robotic units with the reasoning capability that would be robust enough to execute complex tasks in dynamic environments. Recent advances in LLMs have positioned them as go-to tools for simple reasoning tasks, motivating the pioneering work of Liang et al. [35] that uses an LLM to translate natural language commands into low-level static execution plans for robotic units. Using LLMs inside robotics systems brings their generalization to a new level, enabling zero-shot generalization to new tasks. This paper extends this prior work to dynamic environments. We propose InCoRo, a system that uses a classical robotic feedback loop composed of an LLM controller, a scene understanding unit, and a robot. Our system continuously analyzes the state of the environment and provides adapted execution commands, enabling the robot to adjust to changing environmental conditions and correcting for controller errors. Our system does not require any iterative optimization to learn to accomplish a task as it leverages in-context learning with an off-the-shelf LLM model. Through an extensive validation process involving two standardized industrial robotic units -- SCARA and DELTA types -- we contribute knowledge about these robots, not popular in the community, thereby enriching it. We highlight the generalization capabilities of our system and show that (1) in-context learning in combination with the current state-of-the-art LLMs is an effective way to implement a robotic controller; (2) in static environments, InCoRo surpasses the prior art in terms of the success rate; (3) in dynamic environments, we establish new state-of-the-art for the SCARA and DELTA units, respectively. This research paves the way towards building reliable, efficient, intelligent autonomous systems that adapt to dynamic environments.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

EgoAVFlow: Robot Policy Learning with Active Vision from Human Egocentric Videos via 3D Flow

Egocentric human videos provide a scalable source of manipulation demonstrations; however, deploying them on robots requires active viewpoint control to maintain task-critical visibility, which human viewpoint imitation often fails to provide due to human-specific priors. We propose EgoAVFlow, which learns manipulation and active vision from egocentric videos through a shared 3D flow representation that supports geometric visibility reasoning and transfers without robot demonstrations. EgoAVFlow uses diffusion models to predict robot actions, future 3D flow, and camera trajectories, and refines viewpoints at test time with reward-maximizing denoising under a visibility-aware reward computed from predicted motion and scene geometry. Real-world experiments under actively changing viewpoints show that EgoAVFlow consistently outperforms prior human-demo-based baselines, demonstrating effective visibility maintenance and robust manipulation without robot demonstrations.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

A Simulation Pipeline to Facilitate Real-World Robotic Reinforcement Learning Applications

Reinforcement learning (RL) has gained traction for its success in solving complex tasks for robotic applications. However, its deployment on physical robots remains challenging due to safety risks and the comparatively high costs of training. To avoid these problems, RL agents are often trained on simulators, which introduces a new problem related to the gap between simulation and reality. This paper presents an RL pipeline designed to help reduce the reality gap and facilitate developing and deploying RL policies for real-world robotic systems. The pipeline organizes the RL training process into an initial step for system identification and three training stages: core simulation training, high-fidelity simulation, and real-world deployment, each adding levels of realism to reduce the sim-to-real gap. Each training stage takes an input policy, improves it, and either passes the improved policy to the next stage or loops it back for further improvement. This iterative process continues until the policy achieves the desired performance. The pipeline's effectiveness is shown through a case study with the Boston Dynamics Spot mobile robot used in a surveillance application. The case study presents the steps taken at each pipeline stage to obtain an RL agent to control the robot's position and orientation.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Steertuning Policies from a Few Human Videos

Current recipes for robot learning require massive amounts of robot demonstrations to obtain robust and adaptive policies. In this work, we introduce Steertuning, a system that enables robots to learn new tasks in new environments from 5 human demonstrations in under 5 Steertuning consists of two parts. (1) We pretrain a 400M-parameter diffusion policy on our egocentric human dataset, which consists of 100 hours of densely annotated random interactions. This pretraining makes Steertuning robust to background differences and enables spatial and object generalization when deployed on new tasks. (2) Given 5 demonstrations of a new task, we finetune our model for only 2 minutes (2000 training updates) and steer the policy's actions during reverse sampling using the demonstration whose observation is closest to that of the deployment environment. Together with a carefully designed data processing pipeline for embodiment transfer, this enables Steertuning to achieve a 71% success rate across 12 tasks in 12 new environments, ranging from lab settings to kitchens in new homes. The entire process, from data collection for a new task to robot policy deployment, takes less than 5 minutes. Our full dataset, model weights, codebase, and robot videos will be made available at our website: https://steertuning.github.io.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2019

Imitation Learning of Robot Policies by Combining Language, Vision and Demonstration

In this work we propose a novel end-to-end imitation learning approach which combines natural language, vision, and motion information to produce an abstract representation of a task, which in turn is used to synthesize specific motion controllers at run-time. This multimodal approach enables generalization to a wide variety of environmental conditions and allows an end-user to direct a robot policy through verbal communication. We empirically validate our approach with an extensive set of simulations and show that it achieves a high task success rate over a variety of conditions while remaining amenable to probabilistic interpretability.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Learning Bipedal Robot Locomotion from Human Movement

Teaching an anthropomorphic robot from human example offers the opportunity to impart humanlike qualities on its movement. In this work we present a reinforcement learning based method for teaching a real world bipedal robot to perform movements directly from human motion capture data. Our method seamlessly transitions from training in a simulation environment to executing on a physical robot without requiring any real world training iterations or offline steps. To overcome the disparity in joint configurations between the robot and the motion capture actor, our method incorporates motion re-targeting into the training process. Domain randomization techniques are used to compensate for the differences between the simulated and physical systems. We demonstrate our method on an internally developed humanoid robot with movements ranging from a dynamic walk cycle to complex balancing and waving. Our controller preserves the style imparted by the motion capture data and exhibits graceful failure modes resulting in safe operation for the robot. This work was performed for research purposes only.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Investigating the role of educational robotics in formal mathematics education: the case of geometry for 15-year-old students

Research has shown that Educational Robotics (ER) enhances student performance, interest, engagement and collaboration. However, until now, the adoption of robotics in formal education has remained relatively scarce. Among other causes, this is due to the difficulty of determining the alignment of educational robotic learning activities with the learning outcomes envisioned by the curriculum, as well as their integration with traditional, non-robotics learning activities that are well established in teachers' practices. This work investigates the integration of ER into formal mathematics education, through a quasi-experimental study employing the Thymio robot and Scratch programming to teach geometry to two classes of 15-year-old students, for a total of 26 participants. Three research questions were addressed: (1) Should an ER-based theoretical lecture precede, succeed or replace a traditional theoretical lecture? (2) What is the students' perception of and engagement in the ER-based lecture and exercises? (3) Do the findings differ according to students' prior appreciation of mathematics? The results suggest that ER activities are as valid as traditional ones in helping students grasp the relevant theoretical concepts. Robotics activities seem particularly beneficial during exercise sessions: students freely chose to do exercises that included the robot, rated them as significantly more interesting and useful than their traditional counterparts, and expressed their interest in introducing ER in other mathematics lectures. Finally, results were generally consistent between the students that like and did not like mathematics, suggesting the use of robotics as a means to broaden the number of students engaged in the discipline.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Scaling Vision-Language Reward Learning for Robot Manipulation in Parallel Simulation

Vision-language models (VLMs) can replace human annotators in preference-based reward learning, but sequential API requests and single-environment data collection make training slow and costly. We present RAPID (Reward learning with Adaptive Parallel Image Diversity), a system that couples GPU-parallel rollout with data-aware policy updates, single-request preference labeling, automatic reward stabilization, and representative image sampling. We evaluate these components on five Franka Panda manipulation tasks in IsaacLab. Parallel rollout and adaptive updates provide the first substantial reduction in training time: under matched two-stage prompting, mean runtime falls from 9.18 to 3.13 hours. With all RAPID components enabled, training completes in 1.15 hours using 896 rather than 19,840 API calls per run, and aggregate final success rises from 86.3\% to 98.7\%. This represents an 8.0$\times$ end-to-end speedup and a 95.5\% reduction in API usage. An offline evaluation with Gemma~3 12B and GPT-4.1 mini demonstrates that single-request prompting reduces labeling latency and cost across both models. Code is available at: https://github.com/rapid-vlm/rapid-vlm-rl.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

Dream to Manipulate: Compositional World Models Empowering Robot Imitation Learning with Imagination

A world model provides an agent with a representation of its environment, enabling it to predict the causal consequences of its actions. Current world models typically cannot directly and explicitly imitate the actual environment in front of a robot, often resulting in unrealistic behaviors and hallucinations that make them unsuitable for real-world robotics applications. To overcome those challenges, we propose to rethink robot world models as learnable digital twins. We introduce DreMa, a new approach for constructing digital twins automatically using learned explicit representations of the real world and its dynamics, bridging the gap between traditional digital twins and world models. DreMa replicates the observed world and its structure by integrating Gaussian Splatting and physics simulators, allowing robots to imagine novel configurations of objects and to predict the future consequences of robot actions thanks to its compositionality. We leverage this capability to generate new data for imitation learning by applying equivariant transformations to a small set of demonstrations. Our evaluations across various settings demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy and robustness by incrementing actions and object distributions, reducing the data needed to learn a policy and improving the generalization of the agents. As a highlight, we show that a real Franka Emika Panda robot, powered by DreMa's imagination, can successfully learn novel physical tasks from just a single example per task variation (one-shot policy learning). Our project page can be found in: https://dreamtomanipulate.github.io/.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

Learning Ball-balancing Robot Through Deep Reinforcement Learning

The ball-balancing robot (ballbot) is a good platform to test the effectiveness of a balancing controller. Considering balancing control, conventional model-based feedback control methods have been widely used. However, contacts and collisions are difficult to model, and often lead to failure in balancing control, especially when the ballbot tilts a large angle. To explore the maximum initial tilting angle of the ballbot, the balancing control is interpreted as a recovery task using Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL is a powerful technique for systems that are difficult to model, because it allows an agent to learn policy by interacting with the environment. In this paper, by combining the conventional feedback controller with the RL method, a compound controller is proposed. We show the effectiveness of the compound controller by training an agent to successfully perform a recovery task involving contacts and collisions. Simulation results demonstrate that using the compound controller, the ballbot can keep balance under a larger set of initial tilting angles, compared to the conventional model-based controller.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

From Biological Curves to Soft Modular Robots: Learning-Based Inverse Design with Uncertainty-Guided Refinement

Animals exhibit diverse shape-changing behaviors, from the undulatory swimming of eels to the arching movements of inchworms. Reproducing these biological shapes with modular soft robots offers a promising approach to developing versatile bioinspired robotic systems. However, translating a desired shape into a feasible robotic configuration remains challenging. Existing cable-driven modular soft robots rely on computationally expensive physics-based modeling and combinatorial search for inverse design, making it difficult to efficiently reproduce diverse target shapes. To address this challenge, we present a learning-based real-to-sim-to-real framework that translates biological curves into robotic configurations through surrogate-assisted inverse design and uncertainty-guided refinement. The proposed method combines learned inverse prediction with targeted candidate exploration, using a fast forward surrogate to evaluate and select suitable designs. The learned forward surrogate reduces deformation prediction time from $1.53 \times 10^5$ ms to 0.0008 ms, achieving approximately a $1.9 \times 10^8$-fold speedup. At the same time, the proposed inverse design method reduces design time from $1.99 \times 10^6$ ms to 4.18 ms. On 5,000 test samples generated from previously unseen threading patterns, the method achieves a 93% shape reconstruction success rate under surrogate-based evaluation. Physical demonstrations with four bioinspired robots further illustrate the translation of biological curves into realizable robotic shapes.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2022

Distributed Reinforcement Learning for Robot Teams: A Review

Purpose of review: Recent advances in sensing, actuation, and computation have opened the door to multi-robot systems consisting of hundreds/thousands of robots, with promising applications to automated manufacturing, disaster relief, harvesting, last-mile delivery, port/airport operations, or search and rescue. The community has leveraged model-free multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to devise efficient, scalable controllers for multi-robot systems (MRS). This review aims to provide an analysis of the state-of-the-art in distributed MARL for multi-robot cooperation. Recent findings: Decentralized MRS face fundamental challenges, such as non-stationarity and partial observability. Building upon the "centralized training, decentralized execution" paradigm, recent MARL approaches include independent learning, centralized critic, value decomposition, and communication learning approaches. Cooperative behaviors are demonstrated through AI benchmarks and fundamental real-world robotic capabilities such as multi-robot motion/path planning. Summary: This survey reports the challenges surrounding decentralized model-free MARL for multi-robot cooperation and existing classes of approaches. We present benchmarks and robotic applications along with a discussion on current open avenues for research.

cs.RO↗