Author(s): Dimitri P. Bertsekas
Venue: Book
Year Published: 2019
Keywords: reinforcement learning, optimal control, dynamic programming, neural networks
Expert Opinion: an accessible take on reinforcement learning that pairs well with the classic and influential book(s) on Dynamic Programming by Bertsekas

Author(s): Mohan V., Bhat A., Morasso P.
Venue: Physics of life reviews
Year Published: 2019
Keywords: optimal control
Expert Opinion: The last is a recent article reporting the state of art about the relationship between how to execute and how to imagine (an aspect which has important consequences in robot learning).

Author(s): Jemin Hwangbo, Joonho Lee, Alexey Dosovitskiy, Dario Bellicoso, Vassilios Tsounis, Vladlen Koltun, and Marco Hutter
Venue: Science Robotics
Year Published: 2019
Keywords: policy gradients, neural networks, legged robots, locomotion, dynamical systems
Expert Opinion: Very nice work that combines supervised learning for learning internal models (deep networks) of the series-elastic actuators dynamics with reinforcement learning (specifically, Trust Region Policy Optimization) for learning locomotion policies. They obtained excellent locomotion gaits and were able to learn complex standing-up sequences.

Author(s): Oliver Kroemer, Scott Niekum, George Konidaris
Venue: arXiv
Year Published: 2019
Keywords: survey, probabilistic models, manipulation, reinforcement learning
Expert Opinion: This paper present an incredibly extensive recent survey on learning in robot manipulation (440 citations!!). Surveys are always use especially for new grad students. This one presents a single framework to formalise the robot manipulation problem.

Author(s): Y. Chebotar, A. Handa, V. Makoviychuk, M. Macklin, J. Issac, N. Ratliff, and D. Fox
Venue: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Year Published: 2019
Keywords: reinforcement learning, policy gradients, manipulation
Expert Opinion: There are more than one way to view to this work. One, presented in the paper, is to close the sim2real gap by tuning a parametric simulator. Another is to embed a simulation model in the policy representation and close the loop through online learning.

Author(s): George Konidaris, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Tomas Lozano-Perez
Venue: Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
Year Published: 2018
Keywords: probabilistic models, planning
Expert Opinion: As we get better at low-level robotic control, the community will need to start thinking more about longer-horizon problems and how to smoothly flow between reasoning at different levels of abstraction. This paper presents a theoretically-ground formal treatment of the problem, proves some nice stuff about what constitutes necessary and sufficient symbols for various types of planning, and shows some nice demos on a real robot. It is by far the best analysis of hierarchical learning / planning that I know of and provides a much-needed theoretical foundation for moving this area of research forward.

Author(s): Richard S. Sutton and Andrew G. Barto
Venue: Book
Year Published: 2018
Keywords: mobile robots, reinforcement learning, unsupervised learning, optimal control, genetic algorithms
Expert Opinion: Great introductory text book to the underpinnings of of a lot of the modern approaches in ML/RL for robotics.

Author(s): Marcin Andrychowicz, Filip Wolski, Alex Ray, Jonas Schneider, Rachel Fong, Peter Welinder, Bob McGrew, Josh Tobin, Pieter Abbeel, Wojciech Zaremba
Venue: Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NeurIPS)
Year Published: 2018
Keywords: manipulation, humanoid robotics, reinforcement learning, neural networks
Expert Opinion: HER addresses the issue of sample inefficiency in DRL, especially for those problems with sparse and binary reward functions. It has become one of the most effective algorithms for learning problems with multiple goals which have the potential to solve many challenging manipulation tasks. The idea of "EVERY experience is a good experience for SOME task" is a powerful insight that succinctly reflects how we teach our children to be lifelong learners. We should teach our robots the same way.

Author(s): Dmitry Kalashnikov, Alex Irpan, Peter Pastor, Julian Ibarz, Alexander Herzog, Eric Jang, Deirdre Quillen, Ethan Holly, Mrinal Kalakrishnan, Vincent Vanhoucke, Sergey Levine
Venue: conference on robot learning
Year Published: 2018
Keywords: reinforcement learning, manipulation, neural networks
Expert Opinion: The paper shows that replay buffer based RL methods can be successfully applied to large scale robotic applications. We will see more of this kind of work in the future.

Author(s): Kurtland Chua, Roberto Calandra, Rowan McAllister, Sergey Levine
Venue: Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NeurIPS)
Year Published: 2018
Keywords: reinforcement learning, dynamical systems, probabilistic models, optimal control
Expert Opinion: Model-based reinforcement learning had the image of not performing well in comparison to model-free methods on complicated problems. However, conceptually, model-based methods have many advantages when it comes to data-efficiency and transfer between tasks. This paper shows that with ensemble models state-of-the-art robotic learning benchmarks (Gym-Mujoco environments) can be solved with high performance in significantly fewer steps. The data-efficiency is particularly important for real robot applications.

Author(s): Takayuki Osa, Joni Pajarinen, Gerhard Neumann, J. Andrew Bagnell, Pieter Abbeel, Jan Peters
Venue: Foundations and Trends in Robotics
Year Published: 2018
Keywords: survey, learning from demonstration, reinforcement learning, planning
Expert Opinion: A focused overview of imitation learning and perspectives from some of the leaders in the field. Not a complete review but an excellent highlighting of important contributions in the field and perspective on future challenges.

Author(s): Yuxi Li
Venue: Under review for Morgan & Claypool: Synthesis Lectures in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Year Published: 2018
Keywords: neural networks, reinforcement learning, policy gradients, learning from demonstration
Expert Opinion: A huge bottleneck in Robot Learning is supervision during training. A breakthrough came when DNNs could be leveraged for reinforcement learning. This paper, I believe, is a good introduction.

Author(s): David Ha, Jürgen Schmidhuber
Venue: Neural Information Processing Systems Conference (NeurIPS)
Year Published: 2018
Keywords: neural networks
Expert Opinion: A different take on the deep model-based RL based on use of RNNs to model the world so that the agent can train by hallucination.

Author(s): Vincent Francois-Lavet, Peter Henderson, Riashat Islam, Marc G. Bellemare, Joelle Pineau
Venue: Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning
Year Published: 2018
Keywords: neural networks, reinforcement learning, policy gradients, learning from demonstration
Expert Opinion: There have been astounding achievements in Deep Reinforcement Learning in recent years with complex decision-making problems suddenly becoming solvable. This book is written by experts in the field and on top of that, it is free!

Author(s): Peter Karkus, David Hsu, Wee Sun Lee
Venue: Proceedings of The 2nd Conference on Robot Learning
Year Published: 2018
Keywords: state estimation, neural networks, mobile robots
Expert Opinion: makes clear how the algorithmic ideas from before and end-to-end learning can be combined

Author(s): Lorenzo Jamone, Emre Ugur, Angelo Cangelosi, Luciano Fadiga, Alexandre Bernardino, Justus Piater and Jose Santos-Victor
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems
Year Published: 2018
Keywords: survey, visual perception, mobile robots, reinforcement learning
Expert Opinion: Affordances is an important term for robot learning, but also one that tends to be overloaded and can lead to confusion. If an object allows an agent to perform an action, then the object is said to afford the action to that agent. Affordances can generally be learned autonomously and are thus a fundamental aspect of self-supervised learning for autonomous robots. The nuances of the term however are still widely discussed in robotics and other fields. As a result, one should be aware of the ambiguity and different perspectives regarding the term when talking about affordances. This survey paper discusses some of the nuanced interpretations of the term affordances.

Author(s): John Schulman, Sergey Levine, Philipp Moritz, Michael I. Jordan, Pieter Abbeel
Venue: International Conference on Machine Learning
Year Published: 2017
Keywords: policy gradients, reinforcement learning
Expert Opinion: The work discusses a practical policy optimization method that although can be brittle, it is commonly used in many machine learning and robotics systems. It is also an algorithm that has started conversations around reproducibility of machine learning algorithms.

Author(s): Chelsea Finn, Pieter Abbeel, Sergey Levine
Venue: International Conference on Machine Learning
Year Published: 2017
Keywords: policy gradients, reinforcement learning, neural networks, locomotion
Expert Opinion: Most people probably wouldn't compare MAMAL with HER because the algorithms and the problems they address are vastly different; MAML tackles transfer learning while HER tackles sparse reward issues. But from certain perspective, HER and MAML can make a very complementary pair of parents. HER is like an encouraging parent who, in hindsight, thinks everything the child did is a useful learning experience. MAML, on the other hand, thinks in foresight and wants the child to only learn skills for future job prospects. Does that sound like your parents?

Author(s): Fereshteh Sadeghi, Sergey Levine
Venue: Robotics: Science and Systems Conference
Year Published: 2017
Keywords: neural networks, reinforcement learning, mobile robots
Expert Opinion: The CAD2RL paper demonstrated that it was possible to train a policy, using Reinforcement Learning, entirely in simulation and zero-shot transfer it to a real world robot. It paved the way for a lot of follow up work on domain transfer and domain randomization for robotic perception and control.

Author(s): Sebastien Forestier, Yoan Mollard, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Venue: arXiv
Year Published: 2017
Keywords: learning from demonstration
Expert Opinion: The paper shows how an agent/robot can find out by itself how to manipulate its environment from a simple intrinsic motivation. In my eyes, this is the first practical demonstration of Schmidhuber's idea on learning progress maximization which is probably one of the most powerful generic drives. The paper shows how an agent can discover more and more complex interactions with an environment without a specific task in mind. I believe these kinds of studies are important steps towards an intelligently learning robot.