discovery of complex behaviors through contact-invariant optimization
Author(s): Igor Mordatch, Emanuel Todorov, Zoran Popovic
Venue: ACM Transactions on Graphics
Year Published: 2012
Keywords: planning, contact dynamics, trajectory optimization, locomotion, reinforcement learning
Expert Opinion: The paper demonstrates that with an accurate internal model, planning of complex behaviors including contacts and dynamic interaction with the environment is possible from scratch. I see it as an important result supporting the need for good internal representations, which in the case of real-world interactions need to be at least partially learned.