Welcome to the unofficial homepage of the RObot Learning Lab (RoLL) in the Department for Empirical Inference and Machine Learning of Bernhard Schoelkopf at the Max-Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics! Our research centers around the goal of bringing advanced motor skills to robotics using techniques from machine learning and optimal control. Please check out our research or contact any of our lab members.

Creating autonomous robots that can learn to assist humans in situations of daily life is a fascinating challenge for machine learning. While this aim has been a long-standing vision of artificial intelligence and the cognitive sciences, we have yet to achieve the first step of creating robots that can learn to accomplish many different tasks triggered by environmental context or higher-level instruction. The goal of our robot learning laboratory is the investigation of the ingredients for such a general approach to motor skill learning, to get closer towards human-like performance in robotics. We thus focus on the solution of basic problems in robotics while developing domain- appropriate machine-learning methods.

For doing so, we develop methods for learning models and control policy in real time, see e.g., learning models for control and learning operational space control. We are particularly interested in reinforcement learning where we try push the state-of-the-art further on and received a tremendous support by the RL community. Much of our research relies upon learning motor primitives that can be used to learn both elementary tasks as well as complex applications such as grasping or sports.

The RObot Learning Lab (RoLL) consists of four terrific core robot learning students Duy Nguyen-Tuong, Jens Kober, Katharina Muelling and Oliver Kroemer as well as senior research scientist Jan Peters (who heads this lab). Abdeslam Boularias joined the robot learning lab as post doc in 2010. Both Manuel Gomez Rodriguez and Zhikun Wang are "shared" students who additionally interact with the brain-computer interfaces and the vision group. We are advised by Bernhard Schoelkopf who enables us to have such excellent opportunities. RoLL has also hosted several excellent research interns/external students who have been collaborating with us: Gerhard Neumann (TU Graz), Hirotaka Hachiya (Tokyo Tech), Marc Deisenroth (Cambridge Univ.) and Mauricio Alvarez (Manchester Univ.).

We are also lucky to be supported by a very benevolent Max Planck Director, an excellent mechanics workshop, the highly decorated vision group in our department and quite a few smart machine learning researchers.

In case that you are searching for our address or for directions on how to get to our lab, look at our contact information.

We always have opportunities for excellent Masters/Diploma students from local universities. Check out the currently offered diplomarbeiten or suggest one yourself, drop us a line by email or simply drop by! For Ph.D. or Post-Doc positions please check here or contact Sabrina Nielebock.

Some more information on us fore the general public can be found here.

News

• Members of Robot Learning Lab (RoLL) have gotten three NIPS papers accepted!
• An outstanding post-doc has joined our lab: Abdeslam Boularias !
• Oliver Kroemer, Renaud Detry, Justus Piater, Jan Peters: won the Best Paper Award of the 7th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics (ICINCO) for the paper: Grasping with Vision Descriptors and Motor Primitives.
• Loads of new publications! Check out the AAAI, AIStats, ICRA, IROS, ICINCO, R:SS and SAB papers --- all 2010ers!
• Jan Peters is Area Chair at R:SS 2010, at ECML 2010 and NIPS 2010.
• Katharina Muelling has completed her Masters' degree and upgraded to become a Ph.D. student. Congratulations, Katharina!
• See our new book: From Motor Learning to Interaction Learning in Robots by Olivier Sigaud and Jan Peters.
• Please join our IEEE Technical Committee on Robot Learning if you are interested in robot learning!!!

Recent Events

• The Autonomous Robots Special Issue on Robot Learning is on its way. We have received 46 interesting submissions and have only accepted 8 papers making this special issue highly competitive.
• Plenary talk of Jan Peters at LEMIR 2009 (Learning and Mining for Robotics workshop at ECML-PKDD).
• Dagstuhl Seminar: Cognition, Control and Learning for Robot Manipulation in Human Environments organized by Michael Beetz (TU München), Oliver Brock (U.Mass. in Amherst/TU Berlin), Gordon Cheng (ATR) and Jan Peters from 16.08.09 to 21.08.09.
• Lecture of Jan Peters at the RLSS Robot Learning Summer School at IST Lisbon.
• Jan Peters is Invited Speaker at ISRR in Luzern in September 2009.
• Invited talks at R:SS 2009 Workshops Regression in Robotics - Approaches and Applications and Creative Manipulation: Examples using the WAM by Jan Peters.
• R:SS 2009 Workshops Bridging the gap between high-level discrete representations and low-level continuous behaviors organized by Dana Kulic, (U.Tokyo), Pieter Abbel (U.California in Berkeley) and Jan Peters.
• Invited plenary lecture of Jan Peters at 4th XVR Workshop & Joint PRESENCCIA and SKILLS PhD Symposium.
• ICRA 2009 Workshop: Approaches to Sensorimotor Learning on Humanoid Robots organized Ales Ude, Tamim Asfour, Jun Morimoto, Jan Peters, and Stefan Schaal on 17.05.2009.