We propose a hybrid combination of active inference and behavior trees (BTs) for reactive action planning and execution in dynamic environments, showing how robotic tasks can be formulated as a free-energy minimization problem. The proposed approach allows handling partially observable initial states and improves the robustness of classical BTs against unexpected contingencies while at the same time reducing the number of nodes in a tree. In this work, we specify the nominal behavior offline, through BTs. However, in contrast to previous approaches, we introduce a new type of leaf node to specify the desired state to be achieved rather than an action to execute. The decision of which action to execute to reach the desired state is performed online through active inference. This results in continual online planning and hierarchical deliberation. By doing so, an agent can follow a predefined offline plan while still keeping the ability to locally adapt and take autonomous decisions at runtime, respecting safety constraints. We provide proof of convergence and robustness analysis, and we validate our method in two different mobile manipulators performing similar tasks, both in a simulated and real retail environment. The results showed improved runtime adaptability with a fraction of the hand-coded nodes compared to classical BTs.
Safe and efficient collaboration among multiple robots in unstructured environments is increasingly critical in the era of Industry 4.0. However, achieving robust and autonomous collaboration among humans and other robots requires modern robotic systems to have effective proximity perception and reactive obstacle avoidance. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for reactive whole-body obstacle avoidance that ensures conflict-free robot-robot interactions even in dynamic environment. Unlike existing approaches based on Jacobian-type, sampling based or geometric techniques, our methodolo…
No Plan, Yet Human: A Reactive Robotics Model Predicts Human Planning Failures on a Clinical Task
Robotics and Biology Laboratory, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany（技术大学柏林机器人与生物学实验室，德国）；Science of Intelligence, Research Cluster of Excellence, Berlin, Germany（智能科学，卓越研究集群，柏林，德国）；Robotics Institute Germany（德国机器人研究所）
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；TU Berlin（柏林工业大学）
Robotic manipulation of unknown objects is an important field of research. Practical applications occur in many real-world settings where robots need to interact with an unknown environment. We tackle the problem of reactive grasping by proposing a method for unknown object tracking, grasp point sampling and dynamic trajectory planning. Our object tracking method combines Siamese Networks with an Iterative Closest Point approach for pointcloud registration into a method for 6-DoF unknown object tracking. The method does not require further training and is robust to noise and occlusion. We prop…
A Comparison of Prompt Engineering Techniques for Task Planning and Execution in Service Robotics
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（拉马尔机器学习与人工智能研究所）；Center for Robotics（机器人中心）；Computer Science Institute VI（计算机科学第六研究所）；Autonomous Intelligent Systems group（自主智能系统组）
University of Genoa（热那亚大学）；Italian Institute of Technology（意大利技术研究院）
Object manipulation is a natural activity we perform every day. How humans handle objects can communicate not only the willfulness of the acting, or key aspects of the context where we operate, but also the properties of the objects involved, without any need for explicit verbal description. Since human intelligence comprises the ability to read the context, allowing robots to perform actions that intuitively convey this kind of information would greatly facilitate collaboration. In this work, we focus on how to transfer on two different robotic platforms the same kinematics modulation that hu…
Never Too Late for Force: Accelerating VLA Post-Training with Reactive Force Injection
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Shanghai Innovation Institute（上海创新研究院）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Noematrix Ltd.（诺玛矩阵有限公司）
Automating a robotic task, e.g., robotic suturing can be very complex and time-consuming. Learning a task model to autonomously perform the task is invaluable making the technology, robotic surgery, accessible for a wider community. The data of robotic surgery can be easily logged where the collected data can be used to learn task models. This will result in reduced time and cost of robotic surgery in which a surgeon can supervise the robot operation or give high-level commands instead of low-level control of the tools. We present a data-set of needle insertion in soft tissue with two arms whe…
Holistic Construction Automation with Modular Robots: From High-Level Task Specification to Execution
Technical University of Munich, Department of Computer Engineering（慕尼黑技术大学计算机工程系）；Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；Fraunhofer Italia Research, Robotics and Intelligent Systems Engineering（弗劳恩霍夫意大利研究所机器人与智能系统工程）
APTree: Extended Behavior Trees for Adaptive and Scalable Automated Robotic Task Planning in Construction
University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）；Institute for Computational Design and Construction（计算设计与建造研究所）；Institute for Control Engineering of Machine Tools and Manufacturing Units（机床与制造单元控制工程研究所）
Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学机器人研究所）；Aurora Innovation（奥罗拉创新公司）
Given access to accurate dynamical models, modern planning approaches are effective in computing feasible and optimal plans for repetitive robotic tasks. However, it is difficult to model the true dynamics of the real world before execution, especially for tasks requiring interactions with objects whose parameters are unknown. A recent planning approach, CMAX, tackles this problem by adapting the planner online during execution to bias the resulting plans away from inaccurately modeled regions. CMAX, while being provably guaranteed to reach the goal, requires strong assumptions on the accuracy…
Universidade do Minho（米尼奥大学）；INESC TEC（葡萄牙系统与计算机工程研究所）
Robotics is incredibly fun and is long recognized as a great way to teach programming, while drawing inspiring connections to other branches of engineering and science such as maths, physics or electronics. Although this symbiotic relationship between robotics and programming is perceived as largely beneficial, educational approaches often feel the need to hide the underlying complexity of the robotic system, but as a result fail to transmit the reactive essence of robot programming to the roboticists and programmers of the future. This paper presents ROSY, a novel language for teaching novice…
As robots gain capabilities to enter our human-centric world, they require formalism and algorithms that enable smart and efficient interactions. This is challenging, especially for robotic manipulators with complex tasks that may require collaboration with humans. Prior works approach this problem through reactive synthesis and generate strategies for the robot that guarantee task completion by assuming an adversarial human. While this assumption gives a sound solution, it leads to an "unfriendly" robot that is agnostic to the human intentions. We relax this assumption by formulating the prob…
Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Huawei R&D London（华为伦敦研发中心）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）
Highly dynamic robotic tasks require high-speed and reactive robots. These tasks are particularly challenging due to the physical constraints, hardware limitations, and the high uncertainty of dynamics and sensor measures. To face these issues, it's crucial to design robotics agents that generate precise and fast trajectories and react immediately to environmental changes. Air hockey is an example of this kind of task. Due to the environment's characteristics, it is possible to formalize the problem and derive clean mathematical solutions. For these reasons, this environment is perfect for pus…
Video-to-BT: Generating Reactive Behavior Trees from Human Demonstration Videos for Robotic Assembly
Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI)（慕尼黑机器人与机器智能研究所）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑技术大学）；Aalto University（艾尔沃斯大学）；Shanghai University（上海大学）；Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
University of Potsdam（波茨坦大学）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
Knowledge representation and reasoning capacities are vital to cognitive robotics because they provide higher level cognitive functions for reasoning about actions, environments, goals, perception, etc. Although Answer Set Programming (ASP) is well suited for modelling such functions, there was so far no seamless way to use ASP in a robotic environment. We address this shortcoming and show how a recently developed reactive ASP system can be harnessed to provide appropriate reasoning capacities within a robotic system. To be more precise, we furnish a package integrating the reactive ASP solver…
Code-as-Monitor: Constraint-aware Visual Programming for Reactive and Proactive Robotic Failure Detection
School of Software, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学软件学院）；School of Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学计算机学院）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京人工智能研究院）；Galbot（盖尔博特（Galbot））
Many real-world robotic operations that involve high-dimensional humanoid robots require fast-reaction to plan disturbances and probabilistic guarantees over collision risks, whereas most probabilistic motion planning approaches developed for car-like robots can not be directly applied to high-dimensional robots. In this paper, we present probabilistic Chekov (p-Chekov), a fast-reactive motion planning system that can provide safety guarantees for high-dimensional robots suffering from process noises and observation noises. Leveraging recent advances in machine learning as well as our previous…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
With the advancement of robotics, machine learning, and machine perception, increasingly more robots will enter human environments to assist with daily tasks. However, dynamically-changing human environments requires reactive motion plans. Reactivity can be accomplished through replanning, e.g. model-predictive control, or through a reactive feedback policy that modifies on-going behavior in response to sensory events. In this paper, we investigate how to use machine learning to add reactivity to a previously learned nominal skilled behavior. We approach this by learning a reactive modificatio…
Optimal control in robotics has been increasingly popular in recent years and has been applied in many applications involving complex dynamical systems. Closed-loop optimal control strategies include model predictive control (MPC) and time-varying linear controllers optimized through iLQR. However, such feedback controllers rely on the information of the current state, limiting the range of robotic applications where the robot needs to remember what it has done before to act and plan accordingly. The recently proposed system level synthesis (SLS) framework circumvents this limitation via a ric…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；ABB Corporate Research（ABB企业研究院）；German Aerospace Center (DLR)（德国航空航天中心）
In this letter, we present an approach for learning in-hand manipulation skills with a low-cost, underactuated prosthetic hand in the presence of irreversible events. Our approach combines reinforcement learning based on visual perception with low-level reactive control based on tactile perception, which aims to avoid slipping. The objective of the reinforcement learning level consists not only in fulfilling the in-hand manipulation goal, but also in minimizing the intervention of the tactile reactive control. This way, the occurrence of object slipping during the learning procedure, which we …
We present a behaviour-based reinforcement learning approach, inspired by Brook's subsumption architecture, in which simple fully connected networks are trained as reactive behaviours. Our working assumption is that a pick and place robotic task can be simplified by leveraging domain knowledge of a robotics developer to decompose and train such reactive behaviours; namely, approach, grasp, and retract. Then the robot autonomously learns how to combine them via an Actor-Critic architecture. The Actor-Critic policy is to determine the activation and inhibition mechanisms of the reactive behaviou…
In this paper, we show how a planning algorithm can be used to automatically create and update a Behavior Tree (BT), controlling a robot in a dynamic environment. The planning part of the algorithm is based on the idea of back chaining. Starting from a goal condition we iteratively select actions to achieve that goal, and if those actions have unmet preconditions, they are extended with actions to achieve them in the same way. The fact that BTs are inherently modular and reactive makes the proposed solution blend acting and planning in a way that enables the robot to efficiently react to exter…
Learning Robust Execution in Robotic Manipulation with Agentic Reinforcement Learning
School of Inteligence Science and Engineering, the Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）智能科学与工程学院）；Faculty of Robot Science and Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学机器人科学与工程学院）
NVIDIA（英伟达）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
Zero-shot execution of unseen robotic tasks is important to allowing robots to perform a wide variety of tasks in human environments, but collecting the amounts of data necessary to train end-to-end policies in the real-world is often infeasible. We describe an approach for sim-to-real training that can accomplish unseen robotic tasks using models learned in simulation to ground components of a simple task planner. We learn a library of parameterized skills, along with a set of predicates-based preconditions and termination conditions, entirely in simulation. We explore a block-stacking task b…
GeoPF: Infusing Geometry into Potential Fields for Reactive Planning in Non-trivial Environments
School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham（nottingham大学计算机科学学院）；Technical University of Munich (TUM)（慕尼黑工业大学）；Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI)（慕尼黑机器人与智能机械研究所）
Hanging Around: Cognitive Inspired Reasoning for Reactive Robotics
Applied Linguistics Department University of Bremen（应用语言学系 比勒feld大学）；Digital Media Lab University of Bremen（数字媒体实验室 比勒feld大学）；Department of Computer Science KU Leuven（计算机科学系 卢森堡大学）
