Stanford Seminar - Single-Life Robot Deployment: Adapting On-the-Fly to Novel Scenarios

January 19, 2024
Annie Chen of Stanford University

A major obstacle to the broad application of robots is their inability to adapt to unexpected circumstances, which limits their uses largely to tightly controlled environments. Even equipped with prior experience and pre-training, robots will inevitably encounter out-of-distribution (OOD) situations at deployment time that may require a large amount of on-the-fly adaptation. In this talk, I will first motivate and introduce the problem setting of single-life deployment, which provides a natural setting to study the challenge of autonomously adapting to unfamiliar situations. I will then present our recent work on this problem, Robust Autonomous Modulation (ROAM). By effectively identifying relevant behaviors on-the-fly, ROAM adapts over 2x as efficiently compared to existing methods when facing a variety of OOD situations during deployment. Crucially, this adaptation process all happens within a single episode at test time, without any human supervision.

About the speaker: https://anniesch.github.io/

More about the course can be found here: https://stanfordasl.github.io/robotic...

View the entire AA289 Stanford Robotics and Autonomous Systems Seminar playlist:    • Stanford AA289/ENGR319 - Robotics and Auto...  

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