Learning and Development in Robotics

Course content

Learning and development in humans. Studies in developmental psychology and cognitive science. Novelty, curiosity, and surprise. Social interaction as a means for learning and development. Perception, learning and use of affordances in humans. Language development in children. Robotics as a test-bed for ideas developed in psychology and cognitive science. Review of recent studies in developmental robotics. Machine learning in robotics. Supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning. Markov decision process framework to formulate and study learning problems in robotics. Challenges that robotics poses for using reinforcement learning methods. Inverse reinforcement learning. Apprenticeship learning. Learning from demonstration.