Home Main
Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab
Welcome to the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Group of the Computer Science Department of the Technische Universitaet Darmstadt. Our research centers around the goal of bringing advanced motor skills to robotics using techniques from machine learning and control. Please check out our research or contact any of our lab members. As we originated out of the RObot Learning Lab in the Department for Empirical Inference and Machine Learning at the Max-Planck Institute of Intelligent Systems, we also have a few members in Tuebingen.
Our agenda: Creating autonomous robots that can learn to assist humans in situations of daily life is a fascinating challenge for machine learning. While this aim has been a long-standing vision of artificial intelligence and the cognitive sciences, we have yet to achieve the first step of creating robots that can learn to accomplish many different tasks triggered by environmental context or higher-level instruction. The goal of our robot learning laboratory is the investigation of the ingredients for such a general approach to motor skill learning, to get closer towards human-like performance in robotics. We thus focus on the solution of basic problems in robotics while developing domain- appropriate machine-learning methods.
For doing so, we develop methods for learning models and control policy in real time, see e.g., learning models for control and learning operational space control. We are particularly interested in reinforcement learning where we try push the state-of-the-art further on and received a tremendous support by the RL community. Much of our research relies upon learning motor primitives that can be used to learn both elementary tasks as well as complex applications such as grasping or sports.
In case that you are searching for our address or for directions on how to get to our lab, look at our contact information.
We always have thesis opportunities for enthusiastic and driven Masters/Bachelors students (please contact Jan Peters, Marc Deisenroth, Gerhard Neumann or Heni Ben Amor). Check out the currently offered theses (Abschlussarbeiten) or suggest one yourself, drop us a line by email or simply drop by! We also occasionally have open Ph.D. or Post-Doc positions, see OpenPositions.
Some more information on us fore the general public can be found in a long article in the Max Planck Research magazine, small stubs in New Scientist and the Spiegel, as well as on the IEEE Blog on Robotics and Engadget.
News
- Jan Peters will receive the 2013 Young Investigator Award of the International Neural Network Society (INNS).
- Jan Peters picked up the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society's 2013 Early Career Award at ICRA 2013 at Karlsruhe. See also the Max Planck Press Release and the TU Darmstadt News.
- Jens Kober has won the Georges Giralt PhD Award for the best Robotics PhD thesis in Europe in 2013.
- Andras Kupcsik has gotten a AAAI paper accepted on his work at IAS: Kupcsik, A.G.; Deisenroth, M.P.; Peters, J.; Neumann, G. (2013). Data-Efficient Generalization of Robot Skills with Contextual Policy Search, Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) . See Details Download Article BibTeX Reference .
- Jan Peters has been invited as Action Editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR).
- Jens Kober has gotten his last Ph.D.-related paper Kober, J; Bagnell, D.; Peters, J. (accepted). Reinforcement Learning in Robotics: A Survey, International Journal of Robotics Research. See Details Download Article BibTeX Reference into IJRR, the highest ranked robotics journal.
- Gerhard Neumann, George Konidaris, Freek Stulp and Jan Peters will organize the RSS 2013 Workshop: Hierarchical and Structured Learning for Robotics.
- Jan Peters will be Area Chair at Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2013).
- Katharina Muelling was featured in Deutschlandfunk (German Public Radio, kinda like NPR).
- Zhikun Wang got a paper into IJRR, the highest ranked robotics journal: Wang, Z.; Muelling, K.; Deisenroth, M. P.; Ben Amor, H.; Vogt, D.; Schoelkopf, B.; Peters, J. (accepted). Probabilistic Movement Modeling for Intention Inference in Human-Robot Interaction, International Journal of Robotics Research. See Details Download Article BibTeX Reference .
- Katharina Muelling got a paper into IJRR, the highest ranked robotics journal: Muelling, K.; Kober, J.; Kroemer, O.; Peters, J. (2013). Learning to Select and Generalize Striking Movements in Robot Table Tennis, International Journal of Robotics Research, 32, 3, pp.263-279. See Details Download Article BibTeX Reference .
- Katja Mombaur, Gerhard Neumann, Martin Felis and Jan Peters will organize the ICRA 2013 Workshop: Novel Methods for Learning and Optimization of Control Policies and Trajectories for Robotics.
- Three ICRA 2013 papers accepted: (i) Daniel, C.; Neumann, G.; Kroemer, O.; Peters, J. (2013). Learning Sequential Motor Tasks, Proceedings of 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). See Details Download Article BibTeX Reference and (ii) Englert, P.; Paraschos, A.; Peters, J.; Deisenroth, M. P. (2013). Model-based Imitation Learning by Probabilistic Trajectory Matching, Proceedings of 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). See Details Download Article BibTeX Reference Englert, P. (2013). Model-based Imitation Learning by Probabilistic Trajectory Matching, Master Thesis. See Details Download Article BibTeX Reference and (iii) Gopalan, N.; Deisenroth, M. P.; Peters, J. (2013). Feedback Error Learning for Rhythmic Motor Primitives, Proceedings of 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). See Details Download Article BibTeX Reference .
- Katharina Muelling was featured in the Engadget, the New Scientist and the Spiegel.
- Marc Deisenroth is Workshop Chair for Robotics: Science and Systems (R:SS 2013). Please go to RSS 2013 to propose a workshop.
- Christian Daniel, Gerhard Neumann, Jan Peters paper Daniel, C.; Neumann, G.; Peters, J. (2012). Learning Concurrent Motor Skills in Versatile Solution Spaces, Proceedings of the International Conference on Robot Systems (IROS). See Details Download Article BibTeX Reference received the IROS CoTeSys Cognitive Robotics Best Paper Award while being both the IROS 2012 Best Paper Award Finalist and the IROS 2012 Best Student Paper Award Finalist.
- Marc Deisenroth got a NIPS 2012 paper accepted: Deisenroth, M.P.; Mohamed, S. (2012). Expectation Propagation in Gaussian Process Dynamical Systems, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26 (NIPS), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press., The MIT Press. See Details Download Article BibTeX Reference .
- Abdeslam Boularias got a NIPS 2012 paper accepted: Boularias, A.; Kroemer, O.; Peters, J. (2012). Algorithms for Learning Markov Field Policies, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26 (NIPS 2012), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.. See Details Download Article BibTeX Reference .
- Heni Ben Amor received a very competitive grant from the Daimler-Benz (Stipendium fuer Postdoktoranden und Juniorprofessoren) where out of 800 post-docs and junior professors only 10 were funded. See for more information.
Past News
