Seminars & Events

 

IRIM Seminar Series
All Seminar Sessions Occur @ 12:15 - 1:15 (EST)

Session 6 | Robot Learning: Quo Vadis?

Jan Peters Ph.D. - Professor; Computer Science Department of the Technische
Universitaet Darmstadt | Senior Research Scientist; Max-Planck Institute for
Intelligent Systems

November 18, 2020 | Access URL https://tinyurl.com/IRIMVSSFall6

Abstract: Autonomous robots that can assist humans in situations of daily life have been a long standing vision of robotics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive sciences. A first step towards this goal is to create robots that can learn tasks triggered by environmental context or higher level instruction. However, learning techniques have yet to live up to this promise as only few methods manage to scale to high-dimensional manipulator or humanoid robots. In this talk, we investigate a general framework suitable for learning motor skills in robotics which is based on the principles behind many analytical robotics approaches. It involves generating a representation of motor skills by parameterized motor primitive policies acting as building blocks of movement generation, and a learned task execution module that transforms these movements into motor commands. We discuss learning on three different levels of abstraction, i.e., learning for accurate control is needed to execute, learning of motor primitives is needed to acquire simple movements, and learning of the task-dependent „hyperparameters“ of these motor primitives allows learning complex tasks. We discuss task-appropriate learning approaches for imitation learning, model learning and reinforcement learning for robots with many degrees of freedom. Empirical evaluations on a several robot systems illustrate the effectiveness and applicability to learning control on an anthropomorphic robot arm. These robot motor skills range from toy examples (e.g., paddling a ball, ball-in-a-cup) to playing robot table tennis against a human being and manipulation of various objects.
 
Bio: Jan Peters is a full professor (W3) for Intelligent Autonomous Systems at the Computer Science Department of the Technische Universitaet Darmstadt and at the same time an adjunct senior research scientist at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where he heads the interdepartmental Robot Learning Group between the departments of Empirical Inference and Autonomous Motion. Jan Peters has received a few awards, most notably, he has received the Dick Volz Best US PhD Thesis Runner Up Award, the Robotics: Science & Systems - Early Career Spotlight, the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society's Early Career Award, and the International Neural Networks Society's Young Investigator Award.
 
Access the Seminar Here:
https://tinyurl.com/IRIMVSSFall6
 

 

Conversations with Cabrera Nov. 18 | 6PM EST | Virtual Event

Join President Ángel Cabrera Wednesday, Nov. 18 from 6 to 7 p.m. in conversation with Dr. Ayanna Howard, Chair of the School of Interactive Computing and author of Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI, which explores how the tech world’s racial and sexual biases are infecting the next generation of Artificial Intelligence, with profoundly negative effects for humans of all genders and races.

The hybrid event includes seating for 25 in person, plus a virtual stream. Both have the opportunity to ask questions.

In person tickets.

Join virtually.

 

ISMR 2020-  International Symposium on Medical Robotics
November 18 - 20, 2020 | Virtual Event

The 2020 International Symposium on Medical Robotics (ISMR) will be hosted virtually from November 18-20, 2020. ISMR 2020 will feature keynotes, in addition to oral recorded presentations . ISMR 2020 will bring together people from engineering, medicine, and industry, who are working in various areas within the field of medical robotics, thereby creating a common platform for exchanging ideas and fostering future developments in the field.

Keynote Speakers
 
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