Mayank Mittal

How can a robot learn to use its different parts for interactions?
How can we go beyond proprioception for robust mobile manipulation?
What abstractions are necessary to describe multiple tasks?

To find some answers to the above questions, I am currently a PhD student at ETH Zurich advised by Marco Hutter, and a Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research.

Over the span of my career, I have had the opportunity to work with some amazing robotic groups on many different robotic platforms. I have been a visiting student researcher at Vector Institute, a research intern at NNAISENSE, and a part-time research engineer at ETH Zurich. During my undergrad at IIT Kanpur, I was a visiting student at University of Freiburg, Germany, working closely with Abhinav Valada and Wolfram Burgard. I also founded the AUV-IITK team, where I worked on different hardware and software aspects of building an autonomous underwater vehicle.

If you have questions or would like to discuss ideas, feel free to reach out through email!

news

Feb 1, 2024	Four papers (task symmetry in RL, pedipulation, semantic navigation and surgical benchmark) accepted to ICRA 2024
Apr 20, 2023	Our paper on ‘Orbit: A Unified Simulation Framework for Interactive Robot Learning Environments’ is accepted to IEEE RA-L and will be presented at IROS 2023
Jul 1, 2022	Our papers on articulated object and in-hand manipulation are accepted to IROS 2022
Jan 31, 2022	Our paper on ‘A Collision-Free MPC for Whole-Body Dynamic Locomotion and Manipulation’ is accepted to ICRA 2022
Oct 7, 2021	Joined Marco Hutter’s group at ETH Zurich as a PhD student

publications

1. 

   Symmetry Considerations for Learning Task Symmetric Robot Policies Mayank Mittal, Nikita Rudin, Victor Klemm, Arthur Allshire, and Marco Hutter ICRA 2024 [Abs] [arXiv]

   Symmetry is a fundamental aspect of many real-world robotic tasks. However, current deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches can seldom harness and exploit symmetry effectively. Often, the learned behaviors fail to achieve the desired transformation invariances and suffer from motion artifacts. For instance, a quadruped may exhibit different gaits when commanded to move forward or backward, even though it is symmetrical about its torso. This issue becomes further pronounced in high-dimensional or complex environments, where DRL methods are prone to local optima and fail to explore regions of the state space equally. Past methods on encouraging symmetry for robotic tasks have studied this topic mainly in a single-task setting, where symmetry usually refers to symmetry in the motion, such as the gait patterns. In this paper, we revisit this topic for goal-conditioned tasks in robotics, where symmetry lies mainly in task execution and not necessarily in the learned motions themselves. In particular, we investigate two approaches to incorporate symmetry invariance into DRL – data augmentation and mirror loss function. We provide a theoretical foundation for using augmented samples in an on-policy setting. Based on this, we show that the corresponding approach achieves faster convergence and improves the learned behaviors in various challenging robotic tasks, from climbing boxes with a quadruped to dexterous manipulation.

2. 

   Pedipulate: Enabling Manipulation Skills using a Quadruped Robot’s Leg Philip Arm, Mayank Mittal, Hendrik Kolvenbach, and Marco Hutter ICRA 2024 [Abs] [arXiv] [Video] [Website]

   Legged robots have the potential to become vital in maintenance, home support, and exploration scenarios. In order to interact with and manipulate their environments, most legged robots are equipped with a dedicated robot arm, which means additional mass and mechanical complexity compared to standard legged robots. In this work, we explore pedipulation - using the legs of a legged robot for manipulation. By training a reinforcement learning policy that tracks position targets for one foot, we enable a dedicated pedipulation controller that is robust to disturbances, has a large workspace through whole-body behaviors, and can reach far-away targets with gait emergence, enabling loco-pedipulation. By deploying our controller on a quadrupedal robot using teleoperation, we demonstrate various real-world tasks such as door opening, sample collection, and pushing obstacles. We demonstrate load carrying of more than 2.0 kg at the foot. Additionally, the controller is robust to interaction forces at the foot, disturbances at the base, and slippery contact surfaces.

3. 

   ViPlanner: Visual Semantic Imperative Learning for Local Navigation Pascal Roth, Julian Nubert, Fan Yang, Mayank Mittal, and Marco Hutter ICRA 2024 [Abs] [arXiv] [Video] [Code]

   Real-time path planning in outdoor environments still challenges modern robotic systems due to differences in terrain traversability, diverse obstacles, and the necessity for fast decision-making. Established approaches have primarily focused on geometric navigation solutions, which work well for structured geometric obstacles but have limitations regarding the semantic interpretation of different terrain types and their affordances. Moreover, these methods fail to identify traversable geometric occurrences, such as stairs. To overcome these issues, we introduce ViPlanner, a learned local path planning approach that generates local plans based on geometric and semantic information. The system is trained using the Imperative Learning paradigm, for which the network weights are optimized end-to-end based on the planning task objective. This optimization uses a differentiable formulation of a semantic costmap, which enables the planner to distinguish between the traversability of different terrains and accurately identify obstacles. The semantic information is represented in 30 classes using an RGB colorspace that can effectively encode the multiple levels of traversability. We show that the planner can adapt to diverse real-world environments without requiring any real-world training. In fact, the planner is trained purely in simulation, enabling a highly scalable training data generation. Experimental results demonstrate resistance to noise, zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, and a decrease of 38.02% in terms of traversability cost compared to purely geometric-based approaches.

1. 

   ORBIT: A Unified Simulation Framework for Interactive Robot Learning Environments Mayank Mittal, Calvin Yu, Qinxi Yu, Jingzhou Liu, Nikita Rudin, David Hoeller, and others IEEE RA-L 2023 [Abs] [arXiv] [Website] [Code]

   We present ORBIT, a unified and modular framework for robot learning powered by NVIDIA Isaac Sim. It offers a modular design to easily and efficiently create robotic environments with photo-realistic scenes and fast and accurate rigid and deformable body simulation. With ORBIT, we provide a suite of benchmark tasks of varying difficulty – from single-stage cabinet opening and cloth folding to multi-stage tasks such as room reorganization. To support working with diverse observations and action spaces, we include fixed-arm and mobile manipulators with different physically-based sensors and motion generators. ORBIT allows training reinforcement learning policies and collecting large demonstration datasets from hand-crafted or expert solutions in a matter of minutes by leveraging GPU-based parallelization. In summary, we offer an open-sourced framework that readily comes with 16 robotic platforms, 4 sensor modalities, 10 motion generators, more than 20 benchmark tasks, and wrappers to 4 learning libraries. With this framework, we aim to support various research areas, including representation learning, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and task and motion planning. We hope it helps establish interdisciplinary collaborations in these communities, and its modularity makes it easily extensible for more tasks and applications in the future.

1. 

   A Collision-Free MPC for Whole-Body Dynamic Locomotion and Manipulation Jia-Ruei Chiu, Jean-Pierre Sleiman, Mayank Mittal, Farbod Farshidian, and Marco Hutter ICRA 2022 [Abs] [arXiv] [Video]

   In this paper, we present a real-time whole-body planner for collision-free legged mobile manipulation. We enforce both self-collision and environment-collision avoidance as soft constraints within a Model Predictive Control (MPC) scheme that solves a multi-contact optimal control problem. By penalizing the signed distances among a set of representative primitive collision bodies, the robot is able to safely execute a variety of dynamic maneuvers while preventing any self-collisions. Moreover, collision-free navigation and manipulation in both static and dynamic environments are made viable through efficient queries of distances and their gradients via a euclidean signed distance field. We demonstrate through a comparative study that our approach only slightly increases the computational complexity of the MPC planning. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our framework through a set of hardware experiments involving dynamic mobile manipulation tasks with potential collisions, such as locomotion balancing with the swinging arm, weight throwing, and autonomous door opening.

2. 

   Transferring Dexterous Manipulation from GPU Simulation to a Remote Real-World TriFinger Arthur Allshire, Mayank Mittal, Varun Lodaya, Viktor Makoviychuk, Denys Makoviichuk, Felix Widmaier, Manuel Wüthrich, Stefan Bauer, Ankur Handa, and Animesh Garg IROS 2022 [Abs] [arXiv] [Website] [Code]

   We present a system for learning a challenging dexterous manipulation task involving moving a cube to an arbitrary 6-DoF pose with only 3-fingers trained with NVIDIA’s IsaacGym simulator. We show empirical benefits, both in simulation and sim-to-real transfer, of using keypoints as opposed to position+quaternion representations for the object pose in 6-DoF for policy observations and in reward calculation to train a model-free reinforcement learning agent. By utilizing domain randomization strategies along with the keypoint representation of the pose of the manipulated object, we achieve a high success rate of 83% on a remote TriFinger system maintained by the organizers of the Real Robot Challenge. With the aim of assisting further research in learning in-hand manipulation, we make the codebase of our system, along with trained checkpoints that come with billions of steps of experience available, available publicly.

3. 

   Articulated Object Interaction in Unknown Scenes with Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation Mayank Mittal, David Hoeller, Farbod Farshidian, Marco Hutter, and Animesh Garg IROS 2022 [Abs] [arXiv] [Website]

   A kitchen assistant needs to operate human-scale objects, such as cabinets and ovens, in unmapped environments with dynamic obstacles. Autonomous interactions in such real-world environments require integrating dexterous manipulation and fluid mobility. While mobile manipulators in different form-factors provide an extended workspace, their real-world adoption has been limited. This limitation is in part due to two main reasons: 1) inability to interact with unknown human-scale objects such as cabinets and ovens, and 2) inefficient coordination between the arm and the mobile base. Executing a high-level task for general objects requires a perceptual understanding of the object as well as adaptive whole-body control among dynamic obstacles. In this paper, we propose a two-stage architecture for autonomous interaction with large articulated objects in unknown environments. The first stage uses a learned model to estimate the articulated model of a target object from an RGB-D input and predicts an action-conditional sequence of states for interaction. The second stage comprises of a whole-body motion controller to manipulate the object along the generated kinematic plan. We show that our proposed pipeline can handle complicated static and dynamic kitchen settings. Moreover, we demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves better performance than commonly used control methods in mobile manipulation.

1. 

   Neural Lyapunov Model Predictive Control Mayank Mittal, Marco Gallieri, Alessio Quaglino, Seyed Sina Mirrazavi Salehian, and Jan Koutnik (Under Review) [Abs] [arXiv]

   This paper presents Neural Lyapunov MPC, an algorithm to alternately train a Lyapunov neural network and a stabilising constrained Model Predictive Controller (MPC), given a neural network model of the system dynamics. This extends recent works on Lyapunov networks to be able to train solely from expert demonstrations of one-step transitions. The learned Lyapunov network is used as the value function for the MPC in order to guarantee stability and extend the stable region. Formal results are presented on the existence of a set of MPC parameters, such as discount factors, that guarantees stability with a horizon as short as one. Robustness margins are also discussed and existing performance bounds on value function MPC are extended to the case of imperfect models. The approach is tested on unstable non-linear continuous control tasks with hard constraints. Results demonstrate that, when a neural network trained on short sequences is used for predictions, a one-step horizon Neural Lyapunov MPC can successfully reproduce the expert behaviour and significantly outperform longer horizon MPCs.

2. 

   Learning Camera Miscalibration Detection Andrei Cramariuc, Aleksandar Petrov, Rohit Suri, Mayank Mittal, Roland Siegwart, and Cesar Cadena ICRA 2020 [Abs] [arXiv] [Code]

   Self-diagnosis and self-repair are some of the key challenges in deploying robotic platforms for long-term real-world applications. One of the issues that can occur to a robot is miscalibration of its sensors due to aging, environmental transients or external disturbances. Precise calibration lies at the core of a variety of applications, due to the need to accurately perceive the world. However, while a lot of work has focused on calibrating the sensors, not much has been done towards identifying when a sensor needs to be recalibrated. In this paper, we focus on a data-driven approach to learn the detection of miscalibration in vision sensors, specifically RGB cameras. Our contributions include a proposed miscalibration metric for RGB cameras and a novel semi-synthetic dataset generation pipeline based on this metric. Additionally, by training a deep convolutional neural network, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline to identify whether a recalibration of the camera’s intrinsic parameters is required or not.

1. 

   Vision-based Autonomous UAV Navigation and Landing for Urban Search and Rescue Mayank Mittal, Rohit Mohan, Wolfram Burgard, and Abhinav Valada ISRR 2019 [Abs] [arXiv] [Website]

   Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with bioradars are a life-saving technology that can enable identification of survivors under collapsed buildings in the aftermath of natural disasters such as earthquakes or gas explosions. However, these UAVs have to be able to autonomously navigate in disaster struck environments and land on debris piles in order to accurately locate the survivors. This problem is extremely challenging as pre-existing maps cannot be leveraged for navigation due to structural changes that may have occurred and existing landing site detection algorithms are not suitable to identify safe landing regions on debris piles. In this work, we present a computationally efficient system for autonomous UAV navigation and landing that does not require any prior knowledge about the environment. We propose a novel landing site detection algorithm that computes costmaps based on several hazard factors including terrain flatness, steepness, depth accuracy, and energy consumption information. We also introduce a first-of-a-kind synthetic dataset of over 1.2 million images of collapsed buildings with groundtruth depth, surface normals, semantics and camera pose information. We demonstrate the efficacy of our system using experiments from a city scale hyperrealistic simulation environment and in real-world scenarios with collapsed buildings.

1. 

   Vision-based Autonomous Landing in Catastrophe-Struck Environments Mayank Mittal, Abhinav Valada, and Wolfram Burgard Workshop on Vision-based Drones: What’s Next?
   IROS 2018 [Abs] [arXiv] [Video] [PDF]

   Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with bioradars are a life-saving technology that can enable identification of survivors under collapsed buildings in the aftermath of natural disasters such as earthquakes or gas explosions. However, these UAVs have to be able to autonomously land on debris piles in order to accurately locate the survivors. This problem is extremely challenging as the structure of these debris piles is often unknown and no prior knowledge can be leveraged. In this work, we propose a computationally efficient system that is able to reliably identify safe landing sites and autonomously perform the landing maneuver. Specifically, our algorithm computes costmaps based on several hazard factors including terrain flatness, steepness, depth accuracy and energy consumption information. We first estimate dense candidate landing sites from the resulting costmap and then employ clustering to group neighboring sites into a safe landing region. Finally, a minimum-jerk trajectory is computed for landing considering the surrounding obstacles and the UAV dynamics. We demonstrate the efficacy of our system using experiments from a city scale hyperrealistic simulation environment and in real-world scenarios with collapsed buildings.