Deep Learning for Robot Perception and Cognition introduces a broad range of topics and methods in deep learning for robot perception and cognition together with end-to-end methodologies. The book provides the conceptual and mathematical background needed for approaching a large number of robot perception and cognition tasks from an end-to-end learning point-of-view. The book is suitable for students, university and industry researchers and practitioners in Robotic Vision, Intelligent Control, Mechatronics, Deep Learning, Robotic Perception and Cognition tasks. Presents deep learning principles and methodologies Explains the principles of applying end-to-end learning in robotics applications Presents how to design and train deep learning models Shows how to apply deep learning in robot vision tasks such as object recognition, image classification, video analysis, and more Uses robotic simulation environments for training deep learning models Applies deep learning methods for different tasks ranging from planning and navigation to biosignal analysis

Recent Advances in Robot Learning contains seven papers on robot learning written by leading researchers in the field. As the selection of papers illustrates, the field of robot learning is both active and diverse. A variety of machine learning methods, ranging from inductive logic programming to reinforcement learning, is being applied to many subproblems in robot perception and control, often with objectives as diverse as parameter calibration and concept formulation. While no unified robot learning framework has yet emerged to cover the variety of problems and approaches described in these papers and other publications, a clear set of shared issues underlies many robot learning problems. Machine learning, when applied to robotics, is situated: it is embedded into a real-world system that tightly integrates perception, decision making and execution. Since robot learning involves decision making, there is an inherent active learning issue. Robotic domains are usually complex, yet the expense of using actual robotic hardware often prohibits the collection of large amounts of training data. Most robotic systems are real-time systems. Decisions must be made within critical or practical time constraints. These characteristics present challenges and constraints to the learning system. Since these characteristics are shared by other important real-world application domains, robotics is a highly attractive area for research on machine learning. On the other hand, machine learning is also highly attractive to robotics. There is a great variety of open problems in robotics that defy a static, hand-coded solution. Recent Advances in Robot Learning is an edited volume of peer-reviewed original research comprising seven invited contributions by leading researchers. This research work has also been published as a special issue of Machine Learning (Volume 23, Numbers 2 and 3).

This book presents some of the most recent research results in the area of machine learning and robot perception. The chapters represent new ways of solving real-world problems. The book covers topics such as intelligent object detection, foveated vision systems, online learning paradigms, reinforcement learning for a mobile robot, object tracking and motion estimation, 3D model construction, computer vision system and user modelling using dialogue strategies. This book will appeal to researchers, senior undergraduate/postgraduate students, application engineers and scientists.

Reviews the use of factor graphs for the modeling and solving of large-scale inference problems in robotics. Factor graphs are introduced as an economical representation within which to formulate the different inference problems, setting the stage for the subsequent sections on practical methods to solve them.

As perception stands for the acquisition of a real world representation by interaction with an environment, learning is the modification of this internal representation.This book highlights the relation between perception and learning and describes the influence of the learning in the interaction with the environment.Besides, this volume contains a series of applications of both machine learning and perception, where the former is often embedded in the latter and vice-versa.Among the topics covered, there are visual perception for autonomous robots, model generation of visual patterns, attentional reasoning, genetic approaches and various categories of neural networks.

Humans have long dreamed of robots that can perform a wide variety of tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, and exploring potentially dangerous environments. However, robotics adoption still struggles even in highly-structured environments. In factories, robots currently account for less than one third of the manufacturing workforce. Because many robots need to be hardcoded for every task, they often cannot deal with any errors in their models nor any changes to the environment. In academic research, recent works in machine learning are enabling robots to learn directly from data. Particularly in the areas of learning-based perception and control, we see advancements in deep learning for visual perception from raw images as well as deep reinforcement learning (RL) for learning complex skills from trial and error. However, these black-box techniques often require large amounts of data, have difficult-to-interpret results and processes, and fail catastrophically when dealing with out-of-distribution data. In order to create robotic systems that can flexibly operate in dynamic environments, we want robot perception and control algorithms that have three characteristics: sample efficiency, robustness, and generalizability. In this dissertation, I introduce the concept of ''fusion'' in robot perception and control algorithms to achieve these three characteristics. On the perception side, we fuse multiple sensor modalities and demonstrate generalization to new task instances and robustness to sensor failures. On the control side, we leverage fusion by combining known models with learned policies, making our policy learning substantially more sample efficient.