If you visited the @uwcherryblossom.bsky.social, did you “spot” an unusual visitor among the blooms? Researchers in the @uofwa.bsky.social #UWAllen #robotics group recently took advantage of some nice weather to take our Boston Dynamics robot dog for a stroll around campus. #AI 1/5

This is very cool work, and reminds me of some of the objectives of the LAGR project.

It's also pretty impressive to see robot experiments with different baseline methods in closed loop!

Long Range Navigator gives you the best of both worlds: accurate planning with 3D perception in the short-medium range, and long-range reasoning about distant frontiers in image space! Check out @rohanblueboybaijal.bsky.social's thread for more details :)

Long Range Navigator (LRN) 🧭— an approach to extend planning horizons for off-road navigation given no prior maps. Using vision LRN makes longer-range decisions by spotting navigation frontiers far beyond the range of metric maps.
personalrobotics.github.io/lrn/

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Congrats to Three Minute Thesis preliminary round 5 co-winner, Vivian Shen of @cmurobotics.bsky.social! 📣

Since it began in 2014, 15% of #3MT @carnegiemellon.bsky.social finalists have come from @scsatcmu.bsky.social.

⏰ Join us for the #3MTCMU Championship on 3/11 from 6-8pm. cmu.is/2025-3MT-Champ

Introducing playground.mujoco.org
Combining MuJoCo’s rich and thriving ecosystem, massively parallel GPU-accelerated simulation, and real-world results across a diverse range of robot platforms: quadrupeds, humanoids, dexterous hands, and arms.
Get started today: pip install playground

Have some offline data lying around? Use it to robustify few-shot imitation learning! 🤖

STRAP 🎒 is a retrieval-based method that leverages semantic sub-trajectories in offline datasets to augment the training data.

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The more time I spend on RLHF, the more I realize the devil is in the details (even more than RL for continuous control). My co-author Zhaolin Gao wrote this excellent blog post on some of these details: huggingface.co/blog/GitBag/.... Maybe it'll be your savior!

Even though the Social RL lab only got started ~1 year ago, I’m super excited to announce that we have 10 people from the lab presenting their work at #NeurIPS2024. Delighted to officially introduce our lab: socialrl.cs.washington.edu! Thread with all our NeurIPS work below 👇

BAKU is fully open source and surprisingly effective. We found it easily adaptable for a host of visuotactile tasks in visuoskin.github.io

Heading to #NeurIPS2024 to present Cambrian-1! Catch our oral presentation Friday @ 10am (Oral 5C) and our poster afterwards until 2pm (#3700 in East Hall A-C) 🪼🎉

P3-PO is a great example of how simple human priors can facilitate significantly better generalizability for robot policies.

I will present two papers at #NeurIPS2024!

Happy to meet old and new friends and talk about all aspects of RL: data, environment structure, and reward! 😀

In Wed 11am-2pm poster session I will present HyPO-- best of both worlds of offline and online RLHF: neurips.cc/virtual/2024...

We’ve been investigating how sim, while wrong, can be useful for real-world robotic RL! In our #NeurIPS2024 work, we theoretically showed how naive sim2real transfer can be inefficient, but if you *learn to explore* in sim, this transfers to the real world! We show this works on real robots! 🧵(1/6)

we've used Atari games as an RL benchmark for so long, but for a little while it's bugged me that it's a discrete action problem, since the original joysticks were analog...
@jessefarebro.bsky.social & i fix this by introducing the Continuous ALE (CALE)!
read thread for details!
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I'm excited about scaling up robot learning! We’ve been scaling up data gen with RL in realistic sims generated from crowdsourced videos. Enables data collection far more cheaply than real world teleop. Importantly, data becomes *cheaper* with more environments and transfers to real robots! 🧵 (1/N)

We created an Allen School Starter Pack to help you find and connect with @uofwa.bsky.social #UWAllen labs and researchers on 🦋! We'll add to this list as we grow our community here: go.bsky.app/RyHBLJd
#AcademicBluesky #CompSci #AI #CompBio #UbiComp #Accessibility #NLP #HCI #DataViz #mHealth

I'll be presenting AnySkin at the Stanford Center for Design Research today at 2pm! Stop by for a chat and try the sensor out!

More info: any-skin.github.io

End of an era as Kevin Tracy defends his PhD. Kevin has been with the lab since the very beginning at Stanford, through the move to CMU. He's done amazing optimization-based control work with applications spanning aerospace and robotics and it has been an absolute pleasure working with him.