How long does it take for a robot to learn a task from scratch if no informative prior knowledge is given? Typically, very long. This project aims at developing and applying novel reinforcement learning methods to low-cost off-the-shelf robots to make them learn tasks in a few trials only. We use a standard robot arm by Lynxmotion and a Kinect-depth camera (total cost is 500 USD) and demonstrate that fully autonomous learning (with random intializations) requires only a few trials.
Keywords
- robot learning
- reinforcement learning
- Gaussian processes
- approximate inference
- planning with collision avoidance
Videos
Project Publications
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Marc Peter Deisenroth, Carl Edward Rasmussen, Dieter Fox
Learning to Control a Low-Cost Manipulator using Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning
Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics: Science & Systems (R:SS), 2011 -
Marc Peter Deisenroth and Dieter Fox
Multiple-Target Reinforcement Learning with a Single Policy
ICML-2011 Workshop on Planning and Acting with Uncertain Models