Learning Robot Control Policies that Provably Generalize to Novel Environments

Time: Wednesday, November 13, 2019 - 2:30pm - 3:30pm
Type: Seminar Series
Presenter: Anirudha Majumdar; Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University
Room/Office: Room 107
Location:
Mason Laboratory
9 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
United States

Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science Seminar

Anirudha Majumdar
Assistant Professor
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE)
Princeton University

“Learning Robot Control Policies that Provably Generalize to Novel Environments”

Imagine an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that successfully navigates a thousand different obstacle environments or a robotic manipulator that successfully grasps a million objects in our dataset. How likely are these systems to succeed on a novel (i.e., previously unseen) environment or object? How can we learn control policies for robotic systems that provably generalize well to environments that our robot has not previously encountered? Unfortunately, current state-of-the-art approaches either do not generally provide such guarantees or do so only under very restrictive assumptions. This challenge is exacerbated for robotic systems with rich sensory inputs (e.g., vision) that employ neural network-based control policies.

In this talk, I will present approaches for learning control policies for robotic systems that provably generalize well with high probability to novel environments. The key technical idea behind our approach is to leverage tools from generalization theory (e.g., PAC-Bayes theory) in machine learning and the theory of information bottlenecks from information theory. We apply our techniques on examples including UAV navigation and grasping in order to demonstrate the ability to provide strong generalization guarantees on robotic systems with complicated (e.g., nonlinear) dynamics, rich sensory inputs (e.g., RGB-D), and neural network-based control policies.

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

2:30 – 3:30 pm

Location – Mason 107
Host: Professor Aaron Dollar
Refreshments served at 2:15 pm