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).

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).

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

This book focusses on robotic skill learning and intelligent control for robotic manipulators including enabling of robots to efficiently learn motor and stiffness/force regulation policies from humans. It explains transfer of human limb impedance control strategies to the robots so that the adaptive impedance control for the robot can be realized.

Methods by which robots can learn control laws that enable real-time reactivity using dynamical systems; with applications and exercises. This book presents a wealth of machine learning techniques to make the control of robots more flexible and safe when interacting with humans. It introduces a set of control laws that enable reactivity using dynamical systems, a widely used method for solving motion-planning problems in robotics. These control approaches can replan in milliseconds to adapt to new environmental constraints and offer safe and compliant control of forces in contact. The techniques offer theoretical advantages, including convergence to a goal, non-penetration of obstacles, and passivity. The coverage of learning begins with low-level control parameters and progresses to higher-level competencies composed of combinations of skills. Learning for Adaptive and Reactive Robot Control is designed for graduate-level courses in robotics, with chapters that proceed from fundamentals to more advanced content. Techniques covered include learning from demonstration, optimization, and reinforcement learning, and using dynamical systems in learning control laws, trajectory planning, and methods for compliant and force control . Features for teaching in each chapter: applications, which range from arm manipulators to whole-body control of humanoid robots; pencil-and-paper and programming exercises; lecture videos, slides, and MATLAB code examples available on the author’s website . an eTextbook platform website offering protected material[EPS2] for instructors including solutions.

This book brings together some recent advances and development in robotics. In 12 chapters, written by experts and researchers in respective fields, the book presents some up-to-date research ideas and findings in a wide range of robotics, including the design, modeling, control, learning, interaction, and navigation of robots. From an application perspective, the book covers UAVs, USVs, mobile robots, humanoid robots, graspers, and underwater robots. The unique text offers practical guidance to graduate students and researchers in research and applications in the field of robotics.

This book presents the state of the art in reinforcement learning applied to robotics both in terms of novel algorithms and applications. It discusses recent approaches that allow robots to learn motor. skills and presents tasks that need to take into account the dynamic behavior of the robot and its environment, where a kinematic movement plan is not sufficient. The book illustrates a method that learns to generalize parameterized motor plans which is obtained by imitation or reinforcement learning, by adapting a small set of global parameters and appropriate kernel-based reinforcement learning algorithms. The presented applications explore highly dynamic tasks and exhibit a very efficient learning process. All proposed approaches have been extensively validated with benchmarks tasks, in simulation and on real robots. These tasks correspond to sports and games but the presented techniques are also applicable to more mundane household tasks. The book is based on the first author’s doctoral thesis, which won the 2013 EURON Georges Giralt PhD Award.