Publications by Sylvain Calinon

Related publications (85)

Learning Optimal Impedance Control During Complex 3D Arm Movements

In daily life, humans use their limbs to perform various movements to interact with an external environment. Thanks to limb's variable and adaptive stiffness, humans can adapt their movements to unstable dynamics of the external environments. The underlyin ...

IEEE2021

Whole-Body Ergodic Exploration With a Manipulator Using Diffusion

Sylvain Calinon, Tobias Löw, Cem Bilaloglu

This letter presents a whole-body robot control method for exploring and probing a given region of interest. The ergodic control formalism behind such an exploration behavior consists of matching the time-averaged statistics of a robot trajectory with the ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2023

Online Inference in Bayesian Non-Parametric Mixture Models under Small Variance Asymptotics

Sylvain Calinon, Ajay Kumar Tanwani

Adapting statistical learning models online with large scale streaming data is a challenging problem. Bayesian non-parametric mixture models provide flexibility in model selection, however, their widespread use is limited by the computational overhead of e ...

2016

Temporal Super-Resolution Microscopy Using a Hue-Encoded Shutter

Sylvain Calinon, Michael Stefan Daniel Liebling, Emmanuel Pignat, Christian Jaques

Limited time-resolution in microscopy is an obstacle to many biological studies. Despite recent advances in hardware, digital cameras have limited operation modes that constrain frame-rate, integration time, and color sensing patterns. In this paper, we pr ...

2019

Analysis and Transfer of Human Movement Manipulability in Industry-like Activities

Sylvain Calinon, Noémie Laure Gwendoline Jaquier

Humans exhibit outstanding learning, planning and adaptation capabilities while performing different types of industrial tasks. Given some knowledge about the task requirements, humans are able to plan their limbs motion in anticipation of the execution of ...

IEEE2020

A framework integrating statistical and social cues to teach a humanoid robot new skills

Aude Billard, Sylvain Calinon

Bringing robots as collaborative partners into homes presents various challenges to human-robot interaction. Robots will need to interact with untrained users in environments that are originally designed for humans. Compared to their industrial homologous ...

2008

Geometric Algebra for Optimal Control With Applications in Manipulation Tasks

Sylvain Calinon, Tobias Löw

Many problems in robotics are fundamentally problems of geometry, which have led to an increased research effort in geometric methods for robotics in recent years. The results were algorithms using the various frameworks of screw theory, Lie algebra, and d ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2023

Probabilistic Iterative LQR for Short Time Horizon MPC

Sylvain Calinon, Teguh Santoso Lembono

Optimal control is often used in robotics for planning a trajectory to achieve some desired behavior, as expressed by the cost function. Most works in optimal control focus on finding a single optimal trajectory, which is then typically tracked by another ...

IEEE2021

Ergodic Exploration Using Tensor Train: Applications in Insertion Tasks

Sylvain Calinon, Suhan Narayana Shetty

In robotics, ergodic control extends the tracking principle by specifying a probability distribution over an area to cover instead of a trajectory to track. The original problem is formulated as a spectral multiscale coverage problem, typically requiring t ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022

From Movement Primitives to Distance Fields to Dynamical Systems

Yiming Li, Sylvain Calinon

Developing autonomous robots capable of learning complex motions from demonstrations remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. On the one hand, movement primitives (MP) provide a compact and modular representation of continuous trajectories. On the othe ...

2025

Small Variance Asymptotics for Non-Parametric Online Robot Learning

Sylvain Calinon, Ajay Kumar Tanwani

Small variance asymptotics is emerging as a useful technique for inference in large scale Bayesian non-parametric mixture models. This paper analyses the online learning of robot manipulation tasks with Bayesian non-parametric mixture models under small va ...

SAGE Publications2019

A geometric optimal control approach for imitation and generalization of manipulation skills

Sylvain Calinon, Amirreza Razmjoo Fard

Daily manipulation tasks are characterized by regular features associated with the task structure, which can be described by multiple geometric primitives related to actions and object shapes. Only using Cartesian coordinate systems cannot fully represent ...

Elsevier2023

Demonstration-guided Optimal Control for Long-term Non-prehensile Planar Manipulation

Sylvain Calinon, Teng Xue

Long-term non-prehensile planar manipulation is a challenging task for robot planning and feedback control. It is characterized by underactuation, hybrid control, and contact uncertainty. One main difficulty is to determine both the continuous and discrete ...

IEEE2023

VP-STO: Via-point-based Stochastic Trajectory Optimization for Reactive Robot Behavior

Sylvain Calinon, Julius Maximilian Jankowski

Achieving reactive robot behavior in complex dynamic environments is still challenging as it relies on being able to solve trajectory optimization problems quickly enough, such that we can replan the future motion at frequencies which are sufficiently high ...

IEEE2023

An Approach for Imitation Learning on Riemannian Manifolds

Sylvain Calinon

In imitation learning, multivariate Gaussians are widely used to encode robot behaviors. Such approaches do not provide the ability to properly represent end-effector orientation, as the distance metric in the space of orientations is not Euclidean. In thi ...

2017

Learning to Guide Online Multi-Contact Receding Horizon Planning

Sylvain Calinon, Teguh Santoso Lembono

In Receding Horizon Planning (RHP), it is critical that the motion being executed facilitates the completion of the task, e.g. building momentum to overcome large obstacles. This requires a value function to inform the desirability of robot states. However ...

IEEE2022

Tactile Ergodic Coverage on Curved Surfaces

Sylvain Calinon, Tobias Löw, Cem Bilaloglu

In this article, we present a feedback control method for tactile coverage tasks such as cleaning or surface inspection. Although these tasks are challenging to plan due to the complexity of continuous physical interactions, the coverage target and progres ...

2025

Learning adaptive dressing assistance from human demonstration

Sylvain Calinon, Emmanuel Pignat

For tasks such as dressing assistance, robots should be able to adapt to different user morphologies, preferences and requirements. We propose a programming by demonstration method to efficiently learn and adapt such skills. Our method encodes sensory info ...

Elsevier2017

Statistical Learning by Imitation of Competing Constraints in Joint Space and Task Space

Aude Billard, Sylvain Calinon

We present a probabilistic architecture for solving generically the problem of extracting the task constraints through a Programming by Demonstration (PbD) framework and for generalizing the acquired knowledge to various situations. In previous work, we pr ...

2009

On Learning, Representing and Generalizing a Task in a Humanoid Robot

Aude Billard, Sylvain Calinon, Florent Günter

We present a Programming by Demonstration (PbD) framework for generically extracting the relevant features of a given task and for addressing the problem of generalizing the acquired knowledge to different contexts. We validate the architecture through a s ...

2007