2010.07.16 - Jan Peters - Towards Motor Skill Learning for Robotics

    • We want robots that are compliant and that we are capable of interacting with.
      • We need to develop efficient learning methods
      • How can androids learn basic human tasks
    • Put internal and external sensory information into "state" and forces into "control"
    • Stochastic policy to remove dimensionality problem and allow for exploration
    • Need two types of learning
      • Learn from teacher
        • Try and minimize distance of self action distribution to observed distribution
      • Learn from rewards
        • Reinforcement earning by reward weighted by previous actions (Peters & Schaal 2007)
    • To help with the learning they do the following:
      • Utilized motor primitives
      • Utilize context
    • Learn tasks in operation space
    • Motor primitives are defined in the dynamical systems representation, these are made up of discrete movements and rhythmic movements.
    • The task hyper-parameters are in theory those that are task invariant.