Sylvain CalinonSenior Research Scientist

My work focuses on human-centered robotic applications in which the robots can learn new skills by interacting with the end-users. From a machine learning perspective, the challenge is to acquire skills from only few demonstrations and interactions, with strong generalization demands. It requires the development of intuitive active learning interfaces to acquire meaningful demonstrations, the development of models that can exploit the structure and geometry of the acquired data in an efficient way, and the development of adaptive control techniques that can exploit the learned task variations and coordination patterns.

The developed models must serve several purposes (recognition, prediction, online synthesis), and be compatible with different learning strategies (imitation, emulation, incremental refinement or exploration). For the reproduction of skills, these models need to be enriched with force and impedance information to enable human-robot collaboration and to generate safe and natural movements.