Jens Kober - Associate Professor
Zlatan Ajanović
Description: ICRA 2023 workshop 29 th May 2023 ExCeL London & online *workshop logo generated using Stable Diffusion
Autonomous robots often need to operate with and around humans, to provide added value to the collaborative team, to earn-and-prove trustworthiness, as well as to utilize the support from the human team-mates. The presence of humans brings additional challenges for robot decision-making, but also opportunities for improving the decision-making capabilities with human help. Two major computational paradigms for sequential decision-making are planning and learning.
Planning in multi-stage robotic problems is not trivial, mainly due to computational efficiency (due to the curse of dimensionality) and the need for accurate models. To plan more efficiently, researchers use hierarchical abstractions (e.g. Task and Motion Planning - TAMP). Representing the problem as TAMP enables to incorporate declarative knowledge and to achieve predictable and interpretable behavior. However, creating declarative models requires significant engineering effort and it is practically impos
Learning methods achieved impressive capabilities, solely by improving performance based on the experience (e.g. trial-and-error, human demonstrations, corrections, etc.). However, they generally struggle with the long-term consequences of actions and the problems with the combinatorial structure. They can sometimes give solutions which are contradicting “common sense”, ignore causal effects, and forget previously learned skills (e.g. catastrophic forgetting). These issues are particularly prominent when it
Jens Kober - Associate Professor
Zlatan Ajanović