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

Thank you!

Yea we also went through a lot of the papers that tried to do long range perception for the LAGR project.

Really cool to take inspiration from works almost 20 years old but still very relevant :)

This project was a fun effort with Matt Schmittle, Nathan Hatch, Rosario Scalise, @mateoguaman.bsky.social, Sidharth Talia, @khimya.bsky.social, @siddhss5.bsky.social and Byron Boots.

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This work is a collaboration between the Personal Robotics Lab (@siddhss5.bsky.social) and Robot Learning Lab at the University of Washington @uwrobotics.bsky.social @uwcse.bsky.social

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🤖 Real-world tested: LRN cuts down interventions on Spot and a large tracked vehicle.

✅ Plug & play: Works with nearly any local stack that accepts goal waypoints.

🔄 Auto-labeled: Trained from raw FPV videos using CoTracker to trace camera paths.

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🔥 Key insight: Robots can reason further by learning to identify distant affordable frontiers as intermediate goals.

🧠 How it works: It uses a pre-trained SAM2 backbone + small head to find frontiers in images. Given a goal, it selects the highest-scoring one to navigate to.

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❗️Problem: Robots navigating with no prior maps relying only on local sensors have a limited mapping range (due to sparse/noisy depth) causing myopic decisions.

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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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Excited to attend the talk!

Sweet!! 🙌🤩

Happy holidays from UW Robotics!

UW News put out a Q&A about our recent work on Variational Preference Learning, a technique for personalizing Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) washington.edu/news/2024/12...