Empirical Inference Article 2008

Machine Learning for Motor Skills in Robotics

Autonomous robots that can adapt to novel situations has been a long standing vision of robotics, artificial intelligence, and the cognitive sciences. Early approaches to this goal during the heydays of artificial intelligence research in the late 1980s, however, made it clear that an approach purely based on reasoning or human insights would not be able to model all the perceptuomotor tasks of future robots. Instead, new hope was put in the growing wake of machine learning that promised fully adaptive control algorithms which learn both by observation and trial-and-error. However, to date, learning techniques have yet to fulfill this promise as only few methods manage to scale into the high-dimensional domains of manipulator and humanoid robotics and usually scaling was only achieved in precisely pre-structured domains. We have investigated the ingredients for a general approach to motor skill learning in order to get one step closer towards human-like performance. For doing so, we study two major components for such an approach, i.e., firstly, a theoretically well-founded general approach to representing the required control structures for task representation and execution and, secondly, appropriate learning algorithms which can be applied in this setting.

Author(s): Peters, J.
Journal: K{\"u}nstliche Intelligenz
Volume: 2008
Number (issue): 4
Pages: 41-43
Year: 2008
Month: November
Day: 0
Bibtex Type: Article (article)
Digital: 0
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive
Language: en
Organization: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
School: Biologische Kybernetik
Links:

BibTex

@article{5209,
  title = {Machine Learning for Motor Skills in Robotics},
  journal = {K{\"u}nstliche Intelligenz},
  abstract = {Autonomous robots that can adapt to novel situations has been a long standing vision of robotics, artificial intelligence, and
  the cognitive sciences. Early approaches to this goal during the heydays of artificial intelligence research in the late 1980s,
  however, made it clear that an approach purely based on reasoning or human insights would not be able to model all the
  perceptuomotor tasks of future robots. Instead, new hope was put in the growing wake of machine learning that promised fully
  adaptive control algorithms which learn both by observation and trial-and-error. However, to date, learning techniques have yet
  to fulfill this promise as only few methods manage to scale into the high-dimensional domains of manipulator and humanoid
  robotics and usually scaling was only achieved in precisely pre-structured domains. We have investigated the ingredients for
  a general approach to motor skill learning in order to get one step closer towards human-like performance. For doing so, we
  study two major components for such an approach, i.e., firstly, a theoretically well-founded general approach to representing
  the required control structures for task representation and execution and, secondly, appropriate learning algorithms which can
  be applied in this setting.},
  volume = {2008},
  number = {4},
  pages = {41-43},
  organization = {Max-Planck-Gesellschaft},
  school = {Biologische Kybernetik},
  month = nov,
  year = {2008},
  slug = {5209},
  author = {Peters, J.},
  month_numeric = {11}
}