Publications related to Recognition and Reproduction of Gestures using a Probabilistic Framework combining PCA, ICA and HMM

Online Multicontact Receding Horizon Planning via Value Function Approximation

Planning multicontact motions in a receding horizon fashion requires a value function to guide the planning with respect to the future, e.g., building momentum to traverse large obstacles. Traditionally, the value function is approximated by computing traj ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

Robust machine learning for neuroscientific inference

Steffen Schneider

Modern neuroscience research is generating increasingly large datasets, from recording thousands of neurons over long timescales to behavioral recordings of animals spanning weeks, months, or even years. Despite a great variety in recording setups and expe ...

EPFL2024

Exact Obstacle Avoidance for Robots in Complex and Dynamic Environments Using Local Modulation

Lukas Huber

Robots outside of the fenced factories have to deal with continuously changing environment, this requires fast and flexible modes of control. Planning methods or complex learning models can find optimal paths in complex surroundings, but they are computati ...

EPFL2024

Implicit Distance Functions: Learning and Applications in Robotics

Mikhail Koptev

In this thesis, we address the complex issue of collision avoidance in the joint space of robots. Avoiding collisions with both the robot's own body parts and obstacles in the environment is a critical constraint in motion planning and is crucial for ensur ...

EPFL2023

Self-Correcting Quadratic Programming-Based Robot Control

Aude Billard, Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis, Farshad Khadivar

Quadratic Programming (QP)-based controllers allow many robotic systems, such as humanoids, to successfully undertake complex motions and interactions. However, these approaches rely heavily on adequately capturing the underlying model of the environment a ...

2023

Scalable and Privacy-Preserving Federated Principal Component Analysis

Jean-Pierre Hubaux, Jean-Philippe Léonard Bossuat, David Jules Froelicher, Joao André Gomes de Sá e Sousa, Juan Ramón Troncoso-Pastoriza, Apostolos Pyrgelis

Principal component analysis (PCA) is an essential algorithm for dimensionality reduction in many data science domains. We address the problem of performing a federated PCA on private data distributed among multiple data providers while ensuring data confi ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2023

Accessible Soft Robotics Education with Re-configurable Balloon Robots

Yi-Shiun Wu, Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kieran Daniel Gilday

Soft robotics requires effective tools to educate the next generation of engineers and researchers. Stemming from a lack of universally accepted principles for education and with high barriers to entry in terms of fabrication and hardware, education to dat ...

IEEE2023

Tales from a Robotic World. How Intelligent Machines Will Shape Our Future

Dario Floreano, Nicola Nosengo

Stories from the future of intelligent machines—from rescue drones to robot spouses—and accounts of cutting-edge research that could make it all possible. Tech prognosticators promised us robots—autonomous humanoids that could carry out any number of tasks ...

MIT Press2022

Advancing coordination control of multi-limb robotic tasks: application to bimanual dynamic manipulation and bipedal reactive locomotion

Michael Bosongo Bombile

Bi-manual picking up of objects to toss them on a conveyor belt are dynamic manipulation activities generated daily in the industry. Such repetitive and physically demanding tasks are still done largely by humans for lack of similarly fast, precise, and ro ...

EPFL2022

Autoencoders reloaded

Hervé Bourlard, Selen Hande Kabil

In Bourlard and Kamp (Biol Cybern 59(4):291-294, 1998), it was theoretically proven that autoencoders (AE) with single hidden layer (previously called "auto-associative multilayer perceptrons") were, in the best case, implementing singular value decomposit ...

SPRINGER2022

Learning to Guide Online Multi-Contact Receding Horizon Planning

Sylvain Calinon, Teguh Santoso Lembono

In Receding Horizon Planning (RHP), it is critical that the motion being executed facilitates the completion of the task, e.g. building momentum to overcome large obstacles. This requires a value function to inform the desirability of robot states. However ...

IEEE2022

Evaluating the Explainers: Black-Box Explainable Machine Learning for Student Success Prediction in MOOCs

Tanja Christina Käser Jacober, Natasa Krco, Vinitra Swamy, Mirko Marras, Bahar Radmehr

Neural networks are ubiquitous in applied machine learning for education. Their pervasive success in predictive performance comes alongside a severe weakness, the lack of explainability of their decisions, especially relevant in human-centric fields. We im ...

2022

Learning from demonstration using products of experts: Applications to manipulation and task prioritization

Sylvain Calinon, Emmanuel Pignat

Probability distributions are key components of many learning from demonstration (LfD) approaches, with the spaces chosen to represent tasks playing a central role. Although the robot configuration is defined by its joint angles, end-effector poses are oft ...

2021

Real-Time Self-Collision Avoidance in Joint Space for Humanoid Robots

Aude Billard, Nadia Barbara Figueroa Fernandez, Mikhail Koptev

In this letter, we propose a real-time self-collision avoidance approach for whole-body humanoid robot control. To achieve this, we learn the feasible regions of control in the humanoid's joint space as smooth self-collision boundary functions. Collision-f ...

2021

Adaptive Task-Space Force Control for Humanoid-to-Human Assistance

Anastasia Bolotnikova

We envision a humanoid robot to serve as a source of additional motion-support forces in assistance for frail persons. In this context, we present a control strategy for a humanoid to adaptively regulate its assistive force contribution. First, we identify ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2021

Product of experts for robot learning from demonstration

Emmanuel Pignat

Adaptability and ease of programming are key features necessary for a wider spread of robotics in factories and everyday assistance. Learning from demonstration (LfD) is an approach to address this problem. It aims to develop algorithms and interfaces such ...

EPFL2021

Learning dynamical systems with bifurcations

Aude Billard, Ilaria Lauzana, Farshad Khadivar

Trajectory planning through dynamical systems (DS) provides robust control for robots and has found numerous applications from locomotion to manipulation. However, to date, DS for controlling rhythmic patterns are distinct from DS used to control point to ...

Elsevier2021

MULLS: Versatile LiDAR SLAM via Multi-metric Linear Least Square

Yue Pan, Yujie He

The rapid development of autonomous driving and mobile mapping calls for off-the-shelf LiDAR SLAM solutions that are adaptive to LiDARs of different specifications on various complex scenarios. To this end, we propose MULLS, an efficient, low-drift, and ve ...

IEEE2021

Effects of eight neuropsychiatric copy number variants on human brain structure

Claudia Modenato, Kuldeep Kumar, Bogdan Draganski, Lester Melie Garcia, Borja Rodriguez Herreros

Many copy number variants (CNVs) confer risk for the same range of neurodevelopmental symptoms and psychiatric conditions including autism and schizophrenia. Yet, to date neuroimaging studies have typically been carried out one mutation at a time, showing ...

SPRINGERNATURE2021

Learning How to Walk: Warm-starting Optimal Control Solver with Memory of Motion

Sylvain Calinon, Teguh Santoso Lembono

In this paper, we propose a framework to build a memory of motion for warm-starting an optimal control solver for the locomotion task of a humanoid robot. We use HPP Loco3D, a versatile locomotion planner, to generate offline a set of dynamically consisten ...

IEEE2020