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Robot Locomotion Group
The goal of our research is to build machines which exploit their natural dynamics to achieve extraordinary agility, efficiency, and robustness using rigorous tools from dynamical systems, control theory, and machine learning. Our current focus in on robotic manipulation, because the revolution in recent machine learning has opened a pathway in these applications to merging control theory and perception at a level that has never been considered before; ideas like "intuitive physics" and "common-sense reasoning" will meet with rigorous ideas like "model-order reduction" and "robust/adaptive control". It's going to be a great few years!
Our previous projects have included dynamics and control for humanoid robots, dynamic walking over rough terrain, flight control for aggressive maneuvers in unmanned aerial vehicles, feedback control for fluid dynamics and soft robotics, and connections between perception and control.
The Robot Locomotion Group is a part of Robotics @ MIT and CSAIL.
Locomotion Group Paper and Multimedia News 
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Motion planning around obstacles with convex optimization
- by Marcucci, Tobia and Petersen, Mark and von Wrangel, David and Tedrake, Russ
From quadrotors delivering packages in urban areas to robot arms moving in confined warehouses, motion planning around obstacles is a core challenge in modern robotics. Planners based on optimization can design trajectories in high-dimensional spaces while satisfying the robot dynamics. However, in the presence of obstacles, these optimization problems become nonconvex and very hard to solve, even just locally. Thus, when facing cluttered environments, roboticists typically fall back to sampling-based planners that do not scale equally well to high dimensions and struggle with continuous differential constraints. Here, we present a framework that enables convex optimization to efficiently and reliably plan trajectories around obstacles. Specifically, we focus on collision-free motion planning with costs and constraints on the shape, the duration, and the velocity of the trajectory. Using recent techniques for finding shortest paths in Graphs of Convex Sets (GCS), we design a practical convex relaxation of the planning problem. We show that this relaxation is typically very tight, to the point that a cheap postprocessing of its solution is almost always sufficient to identify a collision-free trajectory that is globally optimal (within the parameterized class of curves). Through numerical and hardware experiments, we demonstrate that our planner, which we name GCS, can find better trajectories in less time than widely used sampling-based algorithms and can reliably design trajectories in high-dimensional complex environments.
Comments welcome.
- by Peter Werner and Alexandre Amice and Tobia Marcucci and Daniela Rus and Russ Tedrake
Many computations in robotics can be dramatically accelerated if the robot configuration space is described as a collection of simple sets. For example, recently developed motion planners rely on a convex decomposition of the free space to design collision-free trajectories using fast convex optimization. In this work, we present an efficient method for approximately covering complex configuration spaces with a small number of polytopes. The approach constructs a visibility graph using sampling and generates a clique cover of this graph to find clusters of samples that have mutual line of sight. These clusters are then inflated into large, full-dimensional, polytopes. We evaluate our method on a variety of robotic systems and show that it consistently covers larger portions of free configuration space, with fewer polytopes, and in a fraction of the time compared to previous methods.
Supplemental materials: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02875
Under review. Comments welcome.
Constrained Bimanual Planning with Analytic Inverse Kinematics
- by Thomas Cohn and Seiji Shaw and Max Simchowitz and Russ Tedrake
In order for a bimanual robot to manipulate an object that is held by both hands, it must construct motion plans such that the transformation between its end effectors remains fixed. This amounts to complicated nonlinear equality constraints in the configuration space, which are difficult for trajectory optimizers. In addition, the set of feasible configurations becomes a measure zero set, which presents a challenge to sampling-based motion planners. We leverage an analytic solution to the inverse kinematics problem to parametrize the configuration space, resulting in a lower-dimensional representation where the set of valid configurations has positive measure. We describe how to use this parametrization with existing algorithms for motion planning, including sampling-based approaches, trajectory optimizers, and techniques that plan through convex inner-approximations of collision-free space.
Under review. Comments welcome.
Fighting Uncertainty with Gradients: Offline Reinforcement Learning via Diffusion Score Matching
- by H. J. Terry Suh and Glen Chou and Hongkai Dai and Lujie Yang and Abhishek Gupta and Russ Tedrake
Offline optimization paradigms such as offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) or Imitation Learning (IL) allow policy search algorithms to make use of offline data, but require careful incorporation of uncertainty in order to circumvent the challenges of distribution shift. Gradient-based policy search methods are a promising direction due to their effectiveness in high dimensions; however, we require a more careful consideration of how these methods interplay with uncertainty estimation. We claim that in order for an uncertainty metric to be amenable for gradient-based optimization, it must be (i) stably convergent to data when uncertainty is minimized with gradients, and (ii) not prone to underestimation of true uncertainty. We investigate smoothed distance to data as a metric, and show that it not only stably converges to data, but also allows us to analyze model bias with Lipschitz constants. Moreover, we establish an equivalence between smoothed distance to data and data likelihood, which allows us to use score-matching techniques to learn gradients of distance to data. Importantly, we show that offline model-based policy search problems that maximize data likelihood do not require values of likelihood; but rather only the gradient of the log likelihood (the score function). Using this insight, we propose Score-Guided Planning (SGP), a planning algorithm for offline RL that utilizes score-matching to enable first-order planning in high-dimensional problems, where zeroth-order methods were unable to scale, and ensembles were unable to overcome local minima.
Supplemental materials: https://sites.google.com/view/score-guided-planning/home
Under review. Comments welcome.
Non-Euclidean Motion Planning with Graphs of Geodesically-Convex Sets
- by Thomas Cohn and Mark Petersen and Max Simchowitz and Russ Tedrake
Computing optimal, collision-free trajectories for high-dimensional systems is a challenging problem. Sampling-based planners struggle with the dimensionality, whereas trajectory optimizers may get stuck in local minima due to inherent nonconvexities in the optimization landscape. The use of mixed-integer programming to encapsulate these nonconvexities and find globally optimal trajectories has recently shown great promise, thanks in part to tight convex relaxations and efficient approximation strategies that greatly reduce runtimes. These approaches were previously limited to Euclidean configuration spaces, precluding their use with mobile bases or continuous revolute joints. In this paper, we handle such scenarios by modeling configuration spaces as Riemannian manifolds, and we describe a reduction procedure for the zero-curvature case to a mixed-integer convex optimization problem. We demonstrate our results on various robot platforms, including producing efficient collision-free trajectories for a PR2 bimanual mobile manipulator.
To appear at RSS 2023.
Locomotion Group News
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June 14, 2023. Award. Congratulations to Terry Suh, Max Simchowitz, and Kaiqing Zhang who's paper titled "Do differentiable simulators give better policy gradients?" was recognized with the "Best Paper (of the year) Award" from the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Model-based Optimization for Robotics.
January 20, 2023. PhD Defense. Congratulations to Tao Pang for successfully defending his PhD thesis!
July 15, 2022. Award. Congratulations to Terry Suh, Max Simchowitz, and Kaiqing Zhang who's paper titled "Do differentiable simulators give better policy gradients?" was recognized with the "Outstanding Paper Award" at ICML 2022.
January 13, 2022. Award. Congratulations to Alexandre Amice, Hongkai Dai, Pete Werner, and Annan Zhang who's paper titled "Finding and Optimizing Certified, Collision-Free Regions in Configuration Space for Robot Manipulators" was recognized with the "Outstanding Paper Award" at WAFR 2022.
June 17, 2022. PhD Defense. Congratulations to Yunzhu Li for successfully defending his PhD thesis!
June 17, 2022. PhD Defense. Congratulations to Greg Izatt for successfully defending his PhD thesis!
August 15, 2020. Talks on Zoom. For better or worse, most research talks these days are now online. I've posted a handful of links to new talks, including Russ on Lex Fridman's AI Podcast, and at the IFRR Colloquium on the Roles of Physics-Based Models and Data-Driven Learning in Robotics.
July 20, 2020. PhD Defense. Congratulations to Lucas Manuelli for successfully defending his PhD thesis!
May 29, 2020. PhD Defense. Congratulations to Shen Shen for successfully defending her thesis!
September 18, 2019. PhD Defense. Congratulations to Twan Koolen for successfully defending his thesis!
August 19, 2019. PhD Defense. Congratulations to Pete Florence for successfully defending his thesis!
October 15, 2018. PhD Defense. Congratulations to Robin Deits for successfully defending his thesis!
October 3, 2018. Award. Congratulations to Pete Florence and Lucas Manuelli whose paper Dense Object Nets: Learning Dense Visual Object Descriptors By and For Robotic Manipulation won the Conference Best Paper Award at CoRL 2018!
September 19, 2018. Award. Congratulations to Pete Florence and Lucas Manuelli whose paper Dense Object Nets: Learning Dense Visual Object Descriptors By and For Robotic Manipulation won the first ever Amazon Robotics Best Technical Paper Award (2018).
June 18, 2018. Award. Congratulations to Ani Majumdar whose paper Funnel libraries for real-time robust feedback motion planning won the first ever International Journal of Robotics Research Paper of the Year (2017).
April 26, 2018. Award. Congratulations to Katy Muhlrad for winning the "Audience Choice Award" at the SuperUROP Showcase for her work on "Using GelSight to Identify Objects by Touch".
July 26, 2017. Defense. Frank Permenter successfully defended his thesis, titled "Reduction methods in semidefinite and conic optimization". Congratulations Frank!
May 19, 2017. Award. Pete Florence was awarded the EECS Masterworks award. Congratulations Pete!
May 19, 2017. Award. Sarah Hensley was awarded the 2017 Best SuperUROP Presentation award. Congratulations Sarah!
May 16, 2017. PhD Defense. Michael Posa successfully defended his thesis, titled "Optimization for Control and Planning of Multi-Contact Dynamic Motion". Congratulations Michael!