Jens Kober: Robots Learning (Through) Interactions

Talk by Jens Kober (TU Delft, http://www.jenskober.de/) at the Learning and Intelligent Systems Group (TU Berlin, https://argmin.lis.tu-berlin.de/).

Title: Robots Learning (Through) Interactions

Abstract: The acquisition and self-improvement of novel motor skills is
among the most important problems in robotics. Reinforcement learning
and imitation learning are two different but complimentary machine
learning approaches commonly used for learning motor skills.
I will discuss various learning techniques we developed that can handle
complex interactions with the environment. Complexity arises from
non-linear dynamics in general and contacts in particular, taking
multiple reference frames into account, dealing with high-dimensional
input data, interacting with humans, etc. A human teacher is always
involved in the learning process, either directly (providing
demonstrations) or indirectly (designing the optimization criterion),
which raises the question: How to best make use of the interactions with
the human teacher to render the learning process efficient and effective?
All these concepts will be illustrated with benchmark tasks and real
robot experiments ranging from fun (ball-in-a-cup) to more applied
(manipulation in a retail environment).

Short Bio: Jens Kober is an associate professor at the Cognitive
Robotics department, 3mE, TU Delft, Netherlands. He worked as a
postdoctoral scholar jointly at the CoR-Lab, Bielefeld University,
Germany and at the Honda Research Institute Europe, Germany. He
graduated in 2012 with a PhD Degree in Engineering from TU Darmstadt and
the MPI for Intelligent Systems. For his research he received the
annually awarded Georges Giralt PhD Award for the best PhD thesis in
robotics in Europe, the 2018 IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award, and
has received an ERC Starting grant. His research interests include motor
skill learning, (deep) reinforcement learning, imitation learning,
interactive learning, and machine learning for control.

Organized by the Intelligent Systems Lab at TU Berlin (https://argmin.lis.tu-berlin.de/).
Moderated by Andreas Orthey (http://aorthey.de/) and Marc Toussaint (http://www.marc-toussaint.net/).