Coffee Chat: Robot Learning

School life is more interesting than ever. With no courses or TA duties, I have full luxury to learn new trends in robot learning. Amir massoud gave a talk on his ICRA 2009 paper in our group meeting today. Afterwards, we headed to SUB (the Student Union's Building @ Univ. of Alberta) for a coffee and a nice chat about robot learning, visual servoing, parametric vs. non-parametric, and model-based vs. model-free reinforcement learning.

In addition to Amir massoud's reading list on estimation and control of robotic systems, I added the following papers to my to-read list:

• Sethu Vijayakumar, Aaron D'Souza and Stefan Schaal, Incremental Online Learning in High Dimensions, Neural Computation, vol. 17, no. 12, pp. 2602-2634 (2005). [pdf] [More detailed version of the paper Tech Report EDI-INF-RR-0284 of UEDIN]

• Manuel Lopes and Bruno Damas, A Learning Framework for Generic Sensory-Motor Maps, Proc. IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conf. on Intelligent Robotics and Systems, pp. 1533-1538, San Diego, CA, USA, Oct 29 - Nov 2, 2007. [pdf]

Also of general interest to robot learning researchers are the publications of Stefan Schaal, Michael Mistry, and Jan Peters. Also check the rest of Vijayakumar's publications and his research group page at University of Edinburgh. The future of robot learning is very exciting.