Jan Peters – författare

This book reviews research developments in diverse areas of reinforcement learning such as model-free actor-critic methods, model-based learning and control, information geometry of policy searches, reward design, and exploration in biology and the behavioral sciences. Special emphasis is placed on advanced ideas, algorithms, methods, and applications. The contributed papers gathered here grew out of a lecture course on reinforcement learning held by Prof. Jan Peters in the winter semester 2018/2019 at Technische Universität Darmstadt. The book is intended for reinforcement learning students and researchers with a firm grasp of linear algebra, statistics, and optimization. Nevertheless, all key concepts are introduced in each chapter, making the content self-contained and accessible to a broader audience.

This book presents the state of the art in reinforcement learning applied to robotics both in terms of novel algorithms and applications. It discusses recent approaches that allow robots to learn motor.

skills and presents tasks that need to take into account the dynamic behavior of the robot and its environment, where a kinematic movement plan is not sufficient. The book illustrates a method that learns to generalize parameterized motor plans which is obtained by imitation or reinforcement learning, by adapting a small set of global parameters and appropriate kernel-based reinforcement learning algorithms. The presented applications explore highly dynamic tasks and exhibit a very efficient learning process. All proposed approaches have been extensively validated with benchmarks tasks, in simulation and on real robots. These tasks correspond to sports and games but the presented techniques are also applicable to more mundane household tasks. The book is based on the first author’s doctoral thesis, which won the 2013 EURON Georges Giralt PhD Award.

From an engineering standpoint, the increasing complexity of robotic systems and the increasing demand for more autonomously learning robots, has become essential. This book is largely based on the successful workshop “From motor to interaction learning in robots” held at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robot Systems. The major aim of the book is to give students interested the topics described above a chance to get started faster and researchers a helpful compandium.