Why make a walker that can trip people? In rehabilitation there has been an increase in the use of robotics for research purposes. This often takes the form of software written for commercial robots. The design of hardware systems for rehabilitation in robotics provides another avenue for studying human behavior. For assistive device users, especially, … Continue reading FALL-E: A Robotic Walker to Learn About Balance
By Abrar Anwar Robots are increasingly expected to perceive and interact with their environments over extended periods. Robots are deployed for hours, if not days, at a time and they incidentally perceive different objects, events, and locations. For robots to understand and respond to questions that require complex multi-step reasoning in scenarios where the robot has … Continue reading ReMEmbR: Building and Reasoning Over Long-Horizon Spatio-Temporal Memory for Robot Navigation
By I-Chun Arthur Liu Bimanual manipulation is essential for robots to manipulate objects as well as humans. It becomes necessary when objects are too large to be controlled by one hand or when using one hand to stabilize an object makes it easier for the other hand to manipulate it. In this work, we focus … Continue reading VoxAct-B: Voxel-Based Acting and Stabilizing Policy for Bimanual Manipulation
By Anthony Liang Teaching robots to perform complex control tasks from high-dimensional image inputs is a nontrivial problem. State-of-the-art methods require hundreds of manually collected expert demonstrations or hours to days of training in simulation to learn a simple pick-and-place skill. One reason for this is that images are cluttered with distractions for robots, such … Continue reading ViSaRL: Saliency-Guided Visual Representations for Robot Learning
By Ishika Singh Everyday household tasks require both common sense understanding of the world and situated knowledge about the current environment. To create a task plan for “Make dinner” an agent needs common sense: object affordances, such as the stove can be used to make food; logical sequences of actions, such as the oven must be preheated … Continue reading Language Models meet Classical Planners to make smarter Robot Task Plans
Quality Diversity algorithms identify many diverse solutions to solve problems rather than a single best option. Researchers developed pyribs to facilitate development of research projects that use Quality Diversity. Continue reading pyribs: Accelerating Quality Diversity Research
Large language models can help our robots adapt to new tasks and situations by enabling better pre-training and by guiding them in unfamiliar settings. Continue reading LLMs can help robots learn new tasks in unfamiliar places
As a step towards disseminating the robotıcs research taking place at USC to a broader audience, we are launching the Robotics Blog. Continue reading USC RASC launches a Robotics Blog
