Robohub.org
 

Oliver Kroemer: Learning Robot Manipulation Skills… | CMU RI Seminar


by
11 November 2018



share this:

Link to video on YouTube

Abstract: “In the future, robots could be used to take care of the elderly, perform household chores, and assist in hazardous situations. However, such applications require robots to manipulate objects in unstructured and everyday environments. Hence, in order to perform a wide range of tasks, robots will need to learn manipulation skills that generalize between different scenarios and objects. In this talk, Oliver Kroemer will present methods that he has developed for robots to learn versatile manipulation skills. The first part of the presentation will focus on learning manipulation skills through trial and error using task-specific reward functions. The presented methods are used to learn the desired trajectories and goal states of individual skills, as well as high-level policies for sequencing skills. The resulting skill sequences reflect the multi-modal structure of the manipulation tasks. The second part of the talk will focus on representations for generalizing skills between different scenarios. He will explain how robots can learn to adapt skills to the geometric features of the objects being manipulated, and also discuss how the relevance of these features can be predicted from previously learned skills. The talk will be concluded by discussing open challenges and future research directions for learning manipulation skills.”




John Payne

            AUAI is supported by:



Subscribe to Robohub newsletter on substack



Related posts :

Exploring the Moon will require rovers that can think for themselves – an upcoming NASA mission will test whether they can

  04 Sep 2026
NASA is planning to send three small rovers to the Moon to autonomously compute how to best explore a patch of ground.

Surviving the paper deluge: Notes from an ICRA panel on publishing, LLMs, and the future of peer review

Experts discuss peer-review challenges and possibilities for reshaping the process.

When expressive humanoid robots are awkward, people become wary – new brain study

  31 Aug 2026
People become more suspicious of a humanoid robot that makes errors, especially when the robot is an expressive conversation partner.

First 11 vs 11 humanoid soccer game played at RoboCup 2026

  28 Aug 2026
Watch highlights from this historic match.

How green is your robot? And other awkward questions

Robots clean rivers and sort waste, monitor ecosystems, and inspect renewable-energy infrastructure. But even the greenest robot has an environmental footprint.

These tiny drones are powered by sound

  24 Aug 2026
EPFL engineers have designed acoustic cavities that convert sound waves into thrust, propelling small robots and ultralight aerial vehicles without on-board actuators or electronics.

#AAMAS2026 blue sky award winner: Foundation world models for agents in changing environments

and   21 Aug 2026
Hear from the AAMAS 2026 Best Blue Sky Paper Award winner.

Robotics roadmaps from around the world spotlight of the month: Japan

Robots have been a prolific theme in Japanese pop culture and media since the 1950s



AUAI is supported by:







Subscribe to Robohub newsletter on substack




 















©2026.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence