Machine Learning for Robotics

Modern robotics represents an immense source of opportunity to facilitate numerous facets of our daily life with recent advances in statistical machine learning and deep learning pushing the boundaries, previously established by optimal control theory. We focus on leveraging statistic learning and sequential decision theory to cope with long-horizon task learning and task generalization to improve the robustness and safety of embodied agents in unstructured and unpredictable environments. Our research covers the main applications of modern robotics such as control in navigation and manipulation with challenging input modalities in the shape of images, natural language or touch-sensing. We address challenging contexts like deformable object manipulation and multi-robot coordination for navigation. Our work covers the spectrum from the development of efficient and robust learning algorithms to novel, expressive model definitions and challenging everyday tasks in human crowded environments. Embodied agent scenarios naturally require the capability to continuously adapt to ever-changing environments, evolving supervision of human experts in the field, experts without machine learning knowledge.

Our second goal is to better understand and develop the field of machine learning itself because robotics give us the ideal opportunity to challenge the limits of our assumptions about this fascinating research subject. In this context, it is the concepts of common-sense acquisition and reasoning in a complex situation that remain the most important long-term focus of our research effort. We combine machine learning theory, optimal control and Human-Computer Interaction focused on long-term-oriented problems with great relevance to NAVER cloud robotics and Robotics-as-a-Service platforms.

The research lab is part of the machine learning and robotic learning community, and our activities are often pursued in collaboration with external academic partners.