Towards Learning of Generic Skills for Robotic Manipulation

Learning versatile, reusable skills is one of the key prerequisites for autonomous robots. Imitation and reinforcement learning are among the most prominent approaches for learning basic robotic skills. However, the learned skills are often very specific and cannot be reused in different but related tasks. In the project "Behaviors for Mobile Manipulation", we develop hierarchical and transfer learning methods which allow a robot to learn a repertoire of versatile skills that can be reused in different situations. The development of new methods is closely integrated with the analysis of complex human behavior.