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Victor Dhédin

Publications and source records attributed to Victor Dhédin.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

Humanoid-DART: Humanoid Loco-Manipulation using Diffusion-guided Augmentation through Relabeling and Tracking

Imitating human demonstrations has emerged as a dominant paradigm for learning humanoid loco-manipulation policies. However, scaling these approaches remains challenging due to the high cost of collecting diverse demonstrations and the need for continual human intervention to correct policy failures. In this paper, we present a self-supervised framework that bootstraps from sparse demonstrations and progressively expands its behavioral repertoire, enabling the learning of a goal-conditioned policy that automatically explores the goal space with minimal expert supervision. Our approach combines diffusion-based trajectory generation with reinforcement learning, where the latter is used to track goal-conditioned trajectories produced by the diffusion model for a range of loco-manipulation skills. Through extensive ablation studies and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on multiple humanoid loco-manipulation skills.

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Simultaneous Contact Sequence and Patch Planning for Dynamic Locomotion

Legged robots have the potential to traverse highly constrained environments with agile maneuvers. However, planning such motions requires solving a highly challenging optimization problem with a mixture of continuous and discrete decision variables. In this paper, we present a full pipeline based on Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) and whole-body trajectory optimization (TO) to perform simultaneous contact sequence and patch selection on highly challenging environments. Through extensive simulation experiments, we show that our framework can quickly find a diverse set of dynamically consistent plans. We experimentally show that these plans are transferable to a real quadruped robot. We further show that the same framework can find highly complex acyclic humanoid maneuvers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of simultaneous contact sequence and patch selection for acyclic multi-contact locomotion using the whole-body dynamics of a quadruped.

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Task and Motion Planning for Humanoid Loco-manipulation

This work presents an optimization-based task and motion planning (TAMP) framework that unifies planning for locomotion and manipulation through a shared representation of contact modes. We define symbolic actions as contact mode changes, grounding high-level planning in low-level motion. This enables a unified search that spans task, contact, and motion planning while incorporating whole-body dynamics, as well as all constraints between the robot, the manipulated object, and the environment. Results on a humanoid platform show that our method can generate a broad range of physically consistent loco-manipulation behaviors over long action sequences requiring complex reasoning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that enables the resolution of an integrated TAMP formulation with fully acyclic planning and whole body dynamics with actuation constraints for the humanoid loco-manipulation problem.

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Diffusion-based learning of contact plans for agile locomotion

Legged robots have become capable of performing highly dynamic maneuvers in the past few years. However, agile locomotion in highly constrained environments such as stepping stones is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose a combination of model-based control, search, and learning to design efficient control policies for agile locomotion on stepping stones. In our framework, we use nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) to generate whole-body motions for a given contact plan. To efficiently search for an optimal contact plan, we propose to use Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS). While the combination of MCTS and NMPC can quickly find a feasible plan for a given environment (a few seconds), it is not yet suitable to be used as a reactive policy. Hence, we generate a dataset for optimal goal-conditioned policy for a given scene and learn it through supervised learning. In particular, we leverage the power of diffusion models in handling multi-modality in the dataset. We test our proposed framework on a scenario where our quadruped robot Solo12 successfully jumps to different goals in a highly constrained environment.

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Learning feasible transitions for efficient contact planning

In this paper, we propose an efficient contact planner for quadrupedal robots to navigate in extremely constrained environments such as stepping stones. The main difficulty in this setting stems from the mixed nature of the problem, namely discrete search over the steppable patches and continuous trajectory optimization. To speed up the discrete search, we study the properties of the transitions from one contact mode to another. In particular, we propose to learn a dynamic feasibility classifier and a target adjustment network. The former predicts if a contact transition between two contact modes is dynamically feasible. The latter is trained to compensate for misalignment in reaching a desired set of contact locations, due to imperfections of the low-level control. We integrate these learned networks in a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) contact planner. Our simulation results demonstrate that training these networks with offline data significantly speeds up the online search process and improves its accuracy.

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Visual-Inertial and Leg Odometry Fusion for Dynamic Locomotion

Implementing dynamic locomotion behaviors on legged robots requires a high-quality state estimation module. Especially when the motion includes flight phases, state-of-the-art approaches fail to produce reliable estimation of the robot posture, in particular base height. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for combining visual-inertial odometry (VIO) with leg odometry in an extended Kalman filter (EKF) based state estimator. The VIO module uses a stereo camera and IMU to yield low-drift 3D position and yaw orientation and drift-free pitch and roll orientation of the robot base link in the inertial frame. However, these values have a considerable amount of latency due to image processing and optimization, while the rate of update is quite low which is not suitable for low-level control. To reduce the latency, we predict the VIO state estimate at the rate of the IMU measurements of the VIO sensor. The EKF module uses the base pose and linear velocity predicted by VIO, fuses them further with a second high-rate IMU and leg odometry measurements, and produces robot state estimates with a high frequency and small latency suitable for control. We integrate this lightweight estimation framework with a nonlinear model predictive controller and show successful implementation of a set of agile locomotion behaviors, including trotting and jumping at varying horizontal speeds, on a torque-controlled quadruped robot.

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