Learning to Control an Octopus Arm with Gaussian Process Temporal Difference Methods

The Octopus arm is a highly versatile and complex limb. How the Octopus controls such a hyper-redundant arm (not to mention eight of them!) is as yet unknown. Robotic arms based on the same mechanical principles may render present day robotic arms obsolete. In this talk, I will describe how we tackle this problem using an online reinforcement learning algorithm, based on a Bayesian approach to policy evaluation known as Gaussian process temporal difference (GPTD) learning.