[lingtalks] Pieter Abbeel Talk, Friday Feb. 29 at 12pm

[Steven Ford]

The UCSD Department of Cognitive Science is pleased to announce a talk by

Pieter Abbeel

Department of Computer Science
Stanford University

Friday, February 29, 2008 at 12pm
Cognitive Science Building, room 003


"Apprenticeship Learning for Robotic Control with Application to Quadruped 
Locomotion and Autonomous Helicopter Flight."

Many problems in robotics have unknown, stochastic, high-dimensional, and 
highly non-linear dynamics, and offer significant challenges to classical 
control methods. Some of the key difficulties in these problems are that 
(i) It is often hard to write down, in closed form, a formal specification 
of the control task (for example, what is the objective function for 
"flying well"?), (ii) It is difficult to build a good dynamics model 
because of both data collection and data modeling challenges (similar to 
the "exploration problem" in reinforcement learning), and (iii) It is 
expensive to find closed-loop controllers for high dimensional, highly 
stochastic domains. In this talk, I will present learning algorithms with 
formal performance guarantees which show that these problems can be 
efficiently addressed in the apprenticeship learning setting---the setting 
when expert demonstrations of the task are available. I will also present 
how my apprenticeship learning techniques have enabled us to solve 
real-world control problems that could not be solved before: They have 
enabled a quadruped robot to traverse challenging terrain, and a helicopter 
to perform by far the most challenging aerobatic maneuvers performed by any 
autonomous helicopter to date, including maneuvers such as chaos and 
tic-tocs, which only exceptional expert human pilots can fly. 
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