Robotics Challenges for Machine Learning
Jan Peters, Marc Toussaint · MPG.PuRe (Max Planck Society) · 2007
Robotics challenges can inspire and motivate new Machine Learning research as well as being an interest- ing field of application of standard ML techniques. Despite the wide range of machine learning problems encountered in robotics, the main bottleneck towards autonomous robots has been a lack of interaction between the core robotics and the machine learning communities. To date, many roboticists still discard machine learning approaches as generally inapplicable or inferior to classical, hand-crafted solutions. Simi- larly, machine learning researchers do not yet acknowledge that robotics can play the same role for machine learning which for instance physics had for mathematics: as a major application as well as a driving force for new ideas, algorithms and approaches. With the current rise of real, physical humanoid robots in robotics research labs around the globe, the need for machine learning in robotics has grown significantly. Only if machine learning can succeed at making robots fully adaptive, it is likely that we will be able to take real robots out of the research labs into real, human inhabited environments. Among the important problems hidden in these steps are problems which can be understood from the robotics and the machine learning point of view including perceptuo-action coupling, imitation learning, movement decomposition, probabilistic planning problems, motor primitive learning, reinforcement learning, model learning and motor control.