A Road Map for Motor Skill Learning

Autonomous robots that can assist humans in situations of daily life have been a long standing vision of robotics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive sciences. A first step towards this goal is to create robots that can learn tasks triggered by environmental context or higher level instruction. However, learning techniques have yet to live up to this promise as only few methods manage to scale to high-dimensional manipulator or humanoid robots. In this tutorial, we give a general overview on motor skill learning. For doing so, we discuss task-appropriate representations and algorithms for learning in robotics. Among the topics are the learning basic movements or motor primitives by imitation and reinforcement learning, learning rhytmic and discrete movements, fast regression methods for learning inverse dynamics and setups for learning task-space policies. Examples on various robots will be shown; these include ball-paddling, ball-in-a-cup, robot darts, robot table tennis, learning inverse dynamics, learning operational space control, and many others.