Robotics

We present a deep-dive into a learning robotic system that, in previous work, was shown to be capable of hundreds of table tennis rallies with a human and has the ability to precisely return the ball to desired targets. This system puts together a highly optimized and novel perception subsystem, a high-speed low-latency robot controller, a simulation paradigm that can prevent damage in the real...

In recent years, much progress has been made in learning robotic manipulation policies that can follow natural language instructions. Common approaches involve learning methods that operate on offline datasets, such as task-specific teleoperated demonstrations or on hindsight labeled robotic experience. Such methods work reasonably but rely strongly on the assumption of clean data: teleoperated...

We address a benchmark task in agile robotics: catching objects thrown at high-speed. This is a challenging task that involves tracking, intercepting, and cradling a thrown object with access only to visual observations of the object and the proprioceptive state of the robot, all within a fraction of a second. We present the relative merits of two fundamentally different solution strategies:...

As with any machine learning problem with limited data, effective offline RL algorithms require careful regularization to avoid overfitting, with most methods regularizing either the actor or the critic. These methods appear distinct. Actor regularization (e.g., behavioral cloning penalties) is simpler and has appealing convergence properties, while critic regularization typically requires...