The paper introduces an online model‑based reinforcement learning framework that learns a probabilistic dynamics ensemble from scratch for sampling‑based model predictive control, specifically targeting precise, high‑speed control of hydraulic excavators. A precision‑gated contouring objective prioritizes path accuracy over speed, enabling the system to achieve higher sample efficiency than existing model‑based RL baselines in a data‑driven simulator. The method is validated on an 11.5‑ton Menzi Muck M445 excavator, reaching tracking accuracy comparable to prior controllers after only 20 minutes of real‑world interaction and maintaining sub‑centimeter mean path error at high speeds after 40 minutes.
arXiv:2608. 12063v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Integrating locomotion and manipulation is essential for robot autonomy, but scaling standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) to complex tasks is severely bottlenecked by the slow, manual process of dense reward shaping.
Integrating locomotion and manipulation is essential for robot autonomy, but scaling standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) to complex tasks is severely bottlenecked by the slow, manual process of dense reward shaping. To bypass this limitation, we leverage Sample-based Model Predictive Control (SMPC) entirely in simulation as an automated, rapidly tunable expert to generate massive offline datasets.
arXiv:2608. 09138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While learned robotic policies hold promise for advancing generalizable manipulation, their practical deployment is often hindered by suboptimal execution speeds.
arXiv:2608. 20208v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning improves robotic policies using previously collected data without further environment interaction.
Offline reinforcement learning improves robotic policies using previously collected data without further environment interaction. Yet prevalent diffusion- and flow-matching robot policies lack tractable likelihoods, limiting their use in likelihood-based offline RL post-training.
arXiv:2607. 21302v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavior prior reinforcement learning (BPRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm to improve sample efficiency in online reinforcement learning (RL) by leveraging policy priors derived from offline demonstrations.
The paper introduces Sampling-Guided Policy Search (SGPS), a method that combines sampling-based model‑predictive control with first‑order policy gradients to accelerate visual policy learning for locomotion and manipulation tasks. SGPS starts with behavior cloning from sampled actions and then alternates between sampling‑based refinement and short‑horizon policy updates under varied initial states and dynamics. The approach is demonstrated on simulated Unitree Go2 and G1 robots, learning tasks such as obstacle traversal and bimanual carrying, and the distilled policies transfer zero‑shot to a real Go2 robot using onboard depth perception.
While learned robotic policies hold promise for advancing generalizable manipulation, their practical deployment is often hindered by suboptimal execution speeds. Imitation learning policies are inherently limited by hardware constraints and the speed of the operator during data collection.
arXiv:2605. 04568v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: State-of-the-art model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches either use gradient-free, population-based methods for planning, learned policy networks, or a combination of policy networks and planning.
arXiv:2512. 00062v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robotic policy learning for complex real-world manipulation tasks has seen rapid recent progress, enabled in large part by the ability to collect demonstrations through human operation.
arXiv:2503.10118v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The sim-to-real gap remains a critical challenge in robotics, hindering the deployment of algorithms trained in simulation to real-world syst...
arXiv:2607. 10369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow-matching policies have emerged as an effective policy parameterization for robot learning.