9 papers
World-Task Factorization for Robot Learning
Eduardo Sebastián, Adrian Pfisterer, Vito Mengers +2
Robot learning must produce policies that generalize to new combinations of constraints, teammates, and environments. To achieve this, we must structurally factor the policy, which…
Resolving Conflicts Where and When They Arise: Reactive Composition of Multi-Goal Behavior
Vito Mengers, Oliver Brock
Multi-goal robotic tasks are commonly delegated to planning, because reactive control is prone to local minima when objectives conflict. We show that many such failures stem from s…
Probing an Embodied LLM: When Higher Observation Fidelity Hurts Problem Solving
Oussama Zenkri, Oliver Brock
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly proposed as cognitive components for robotic systems, yet their opaque decision processes make it difficult to explain success or fail…
From a Single Demonstration to a General Policy for Contact-Rich Manipulation
Xing Li, Oliver Brock
We present a Learning from Demonstration (LfD) framework that achieves one-shot generalization in multi-stage, contact-rich manipulation tasks. Central to our approach is the utili…
A Mechanistic Model for Collective Motion from Sensorimotor Regularities
Vito Mengers, Bao Duc Cao, Oliver Brock
Collective behavior in animals has long been modeled through self-propelled particle models, which reproduce striking group-level phenomena through abstract interaction forces. Yet…
No Plan, Yet Human: A Reactive Robotics Model Predicts Human Planning Failures on a Clinical Task
Michael Migacev, Vito Mengers, Antonia Köngeter +1
Understanding why some sequential planning problems are harder than others requires models that go beyond average performance. They should capture the specific pattern of which pro…
Identifying and Exploiting Structure in Robot Co-Design
Apoorv Vaish, Oliver Brock
Co-design is a high-dimensional search problem in the robot morphology and control design space. Efficient search requires exploiting the structure shaped by their interaction. To…
A Biologically Inspired Design Principle for Building Robust Robotic Systems
Xing Li, Oussama Zenkri, Adrian Pfisterer +1
Robustness, the ability of a system to maintain performance under significant and unanticipated environmental changes, is a critical property for robotic systems. While biological…
Mechanical problem solving in Goffin's cockatoos -- Towards modeling complex behavior
Manuel Baum, Theresa Roessler, Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró +2
Research continues to accumulate evidence that Goffin's cockatoos (Cacatua goffiniana) can solve wide sets of mechanical problems, such as tool use, tool manufacture, and solving m…