[Colloquium] 12/10 TTIC Colloquium: Robert Platt, Northeastern University

[Mary Marre via Colloquium]

*When:    *  Monday, December 10th at 11:00 am



*Where:     *TTIC, 6045 S. Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526



*Who:       * Robert Platt, Northeastern University


*Title:*        Deictic Abstractions for Robotic Manipulation

*Abstract:* In applications of deep reinforcement learning to robotics, it
is often the case that we want to learn pose invariant policies: policies
that are invariant to changes in the position and orientation of objects in
the world. For example, consider a peg-in-hole insertion task. If the agent
learns to insert a peg into one hole, we would like that policy to
generalize to holes presented in different poses. Unfortunately, this is a
challenge using conventional methods. In this talk, I will describe a novel
state and action abstraction that is invariant to pose shifts called
"deictic image maps" that can be used with deep reinforcement learning. I
will provide broad conditions under which optimal abstract policies are
optimal for the underlying system. Finally, I will show that the method can
help solve challenging robotic manipulation problems.

*Bio:* Dr. Robert Platt is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at
Northeastern University. Prior to coming to Northeastern, he was a Research
Scientist at MIT and a technical lead at NASA Johnson Space Center, where
he helped develop the control and autonomy subsystems for Robonaut 2, the
first humanoid robot in space.


*Host:** Matthew Walte <mwalter at ttic.edu>r*



For more information on the colloquium series or to subscribe to the
mailing list,please see http://www.ttic.edu/colloquium.php




Mary C. Marre
Administrative Assistant
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Room 517*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*p:(773) 834-1757*
*f: (773) 357-6970*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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