Jan Peters
Research Interests
Robot Learning, Robotics, Machine Learning, Cognitive Science and Biomimetic Systems.
Affiliations
1. TU Darmstadt, Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Computer Science Department
2. German Research Center for AI (DFKI), Research Department: SAIROL
3. Hessian Centre for Artificial Intelligence
Contact
peters@ias.tu-darmstadt.de
but please don't send emails before reading → MY EMAIL RULES!
Room E315, Building S2|02, TU Darmstadt, FB-Informatik, FG-IAS, Hochschulstr. 10, 64289 Darmstadt
+49-6151-16-25374
Jan Peters is a full professor (W3) for Intelligent Autonomous Systems at the Computer Science Department of the Technische Universität Darmstadt and, at the same time, he is the dept head of the research department on Systems AI for Robot Learning (SAIROL) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, DFKI). He is also is a founding research faculty member of The Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence.
Jan Peters graduated from the University of Hagen in 2000 with a Diplom-Informatiker (German M.Sc. in Computer Science) with a focus on artificial intelligence and from Munich University of Technology (TU Muenchen) in 2001 with a Diplom-Ingenieur Elektrotechnik (German M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering), majoring in automation & control. In 2000-2001, he spent two semesters as visiting student at National University of Singapore. Subsequently, he moved to University of Southern California (USC) where he completed another M.Sc. in Computer Science with a focus on Machine Learning and a M.Sc. in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering with a major in nonlinear dynamics. During his studies, Jan Peters has been a visiting research student at the Department of Robotics at the German Aerospace Research Center in Germany, at Siemens Advanced Engineering in Singapore and at the Department of Humanoid Robotics and Computational Neuroscience at the Advanced Telecommunication Research (ATR) Center in Japan.
From 2001 to 2007, he was a graduate research assistant at the Computational Learning and Motor Control Lab at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, USA, where Jan has been working with Stefan Schaal, Sethu Vijayakumar (now at U. Edinburgh, UK), and Firdaus Udwadia (Department of Mechanical Engineering). Jan Peters received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC). Chris Atkeson (Robotics Institute at CMU) and Gaurav Sukhatme also guided him to his thesis. In 2011, Jan Peters' PhD Thesis received the Dick Volz Best 2007 US PhD Thesis Runner Up Award based on thesis quality and thesis impact. Jan remains affiliated with the CLMC Lab as an invited researcher. After graduating from USC, Jan Peters became a full-time Senior Research Scientist and Robot Learning Group Leader in the Empirical Inference Department of Bernhard Schoelkopf at the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in 2007-2011 and at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems since 2011. In 2011, Jan Peters joined the Technische Universitaet Damstadt as a full professor (W3) founding the Intelligent Autonomous Systems lab. From 2010 until 2021, he was also an adjunct senior research scientist at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where he used to head the interdepartmental Robot Learning Group between the departments of Empirical Inference and Autonomous Motion. In 2022, he became the department head of the research department on Systems AI for Robot Learning (SAIROL) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, DFKI)
Studies
Topics. Computer Science (Dipl-Inform, MSc, PhD), Electrical Engineering (Dipl-Ing), Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering (MSc)
Universities. Technische Universität München, National University of Singapore (NUS), FernUni Hagen, University of Southern California (USC)
Research Experience
Deutsches Luft- & Raumfahrtzentrum (1997-2000)
ATR Research Center (2000,2003), Japan
University of Southern California (2001-2007), USA
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (2007-2010)
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (2011-2021)
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (2022-now)
Technische Universität Darmstadt (2011-now)
Notable Awards
Dick Volz Best 2007 US PhD Thesis Runner Up Award
ICINCO 2010 Best Paper Awards and Honors
Robotics:Science & Systems 2012 Early Career Spotlight
IROS Best Cognitive Robotics Paper Award 2012
2013 IEEE Robotics & Automation Early Career Award
INNS Young Investigator Award 2013
ICRA Best Cognitive Robotics Paper Award 2014
ERC Starting Grant 2014
IEEE Brain Initiative Best Paper Award 2016
IEEE Fellow 2019
Amazon Research Award 2022
Jan Peters has received a few awards, most notably, he has received the Dick Volz Best US PhD Thesis Runner Up Award, the Robotics: Science & Systems - Early Career Spotlight, the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society's Early Career Award, and the International Neural Networks Society's Young Investigator Award. Together with Nick Roy (MIT), Russ Tedrake (MIT), Jun Morimoto (ATR), Jan Peters founded the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's Technical Committee on Robot Learning which won the Most Active Technical Committee Award. Jan Peters and Andrew Y. Ng (Stanford) have edited a Special Issue on Robot Learning in the Autonomous Robots journal. Jan Peters has been an Area Chair at Robotics: Science & Systems (R:SS), at the European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML), at the International Conference on Neural Networks (ICANN), at International Conference on Artificial Intelligence & Statistics (AIStats) and at Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). Jan Peters has been an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Jan Peters is an Action Editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR). He has also been program co-chair at the Conference on Robot Learning and at IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids).
Jan Peters cares deeply about student and postdoc supervision and has been blessed by some of the most outstanding students. His more than twenty-five graduated Ph.D. students and more than a dozen former postdocs have done outstandingly well in terms of quality and quantity of research results, awards (including both winners and runner-ups of Georges Giralt PhD Award for the best Robotics PhD thesis in Europe), publications ... and job offers! His alumni have started professorships at prestigious universities in the USA (Carnegie Mellon University, Rutgers University, University of Utah, University of Texas at Austin, ...), in Asia (Kyushu Tech, RIKEN AIP, University of Tokyo, Chinese Academy of Science) and in Europe (KIT, TU Delft, University of Amsterdam, Aalto University, Lübeck University, Leoben University, Imperial College, University College London, ...) as well as major IT/AI companies (Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Google/Deepmind, Boston Dynamics, ...) as well as many major AI labs at more general companies (Bosch Centre for AI, Honda Research Institute, Porsche Motor Sports Lab, Volkswagen AI Lab). Even his Master's and Bachelor's thesis students have gotten Ph.D. positions offered at many prestigious places including MIT, CMU, UW, UC Berkeley, Brown University, Georgia Tech, Oxford, KTH, Max Planck Institutes, etc. He hopes all current and future students will do equally well. If you need more information on Jan Peters, please see his tabular curriculum vitae, his short bio or his complete list of publications.
Recent Publications
- Prasad, V.; Heitlinger, L; Koert, D.; Stock-Homburg, R.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G. (conditionally accepted). Learning Multimodal Latent Dynamics for Human-Robot Interaction, Submitted to the IEEE Transaction of Robotics (T-RO).
- Liu, P.; Bou-Ammar H.; Peters, J.; Tateo D. (conditionally accepted). Safe Reinforcement Learning on the Constraint Manifold: Theory and Applications, Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-Ro).
- Urain, J.; Mandlekar, A.; Du, Y.; Shafiullah, M.; Xu, D.; Fragkiadaki, K.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Peters, J. (conditionally accepted). Deep Generative Models in Robotics: A Survey on Learning from Multimodal Demonstrations, IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO).
- Vincent, T.; Palenicek, D.; Belousov, B.; Peters, J.; D'Eramo, C. (2025). Iterated Q-Network: Beyond One-Step Bellman Updates in Deep Reinforcement Learning, Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR).
- Funk, N.; Chen, C.; Schneider, T.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Calandra, R.; Peters, J. (2025). On the Importance of Tactile Sensing for Imitation Learning: A Case Study on Robotic Match Lighting, ICRA 2025 Workshop on “Towards Human Level Intelligence Vision and Tactile Sensing”.
- Kienle, C.; Alt, B.; Katic, D.; Jäkel, R.; Peters, J. (2025). QueryCAD: Grounded Question Answering for CAD Models, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
- Vincent, T.; Wahren, F.; Peters, J.; Belousov, B.; D'Eramo, C. (2025). Adaptive Q-Network: On-the-fly Target Selection for Deep Reinforcement Learning, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
- Diwan, A.A.; Urain, J.; Kober, J.; Peters, J. (2025). Noise-conditioned Energy-based Annealed Rewards (NEAR): A Generative Framework for Imitation Learning from Observation, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
- Straub, D.; Niehues, T.F.; Peters, J.; Rothkopf, C.A. (2025). Inverse decision-making using neural amortized Bayesian actors, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
- Huang, J.; Tateo, D.; Liu, P.; Peters, J. (2025). Adaptive Control based Friction Estimation for Tracking Control of Robot Manipulators, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 10, pp.2454-2461.
- Duret, G.; Bourennane, Y.; Mazurak, D.; Samsonenko, A.; Zara, F.; Chen, L.; Peters, J. (2025). Facilitate and scale up the creation of 3D meshes and 6D category-based datasets with generative models: GenVegeFruits, Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP).
- Palenicek, D.; Vogt, F.; Peters, J. (2025). Scaling Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning with Batch and Weight Normalization, Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM).
- Bohlinger, N.; Peters, J. (2025). Massively Scaling Explicit Policy-conditioned Value Functions, Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM).
- Bohlinger, N.; Czechmanowski, G.; Krupka, M.; Kicki, P.; Walas, K.; Peters, J.; Tateo, D. (2025). Morphology-Aware Legged Locomotion with Reinforcement Learning, German Robotics Conference (GRC).
- Carvalho, J.; Le, A.; Jahr, P. ; Sun, Q. ; Urain, J.; Koert, D.; Peters, J. (2025). Grasp Diffusion Network: Learning Grasp Generators from Partial Point Clouds with Diffusion Models in SO(3)×R3, German Robotics Conference (GRC).
- Chen, J.; Kshirsagar, A.; Heller, F.; Gomez Andreu, M.; Belousov, B.; Schneider, T.; Lin, L. P. Y.; Doerschner, K.; Drewing, K.; Peters, J. (2025). Active Sampling for Hardness Classification with Vision-Based Tactile Sensors, German Robotics Conference (GRC).
- Nonnengiesser, F.; Kshirsagar, A.; Belousov, B.; Peters, J. (2025). Visuotactile In-Hand Pose Estimation, German Robotics Conference (GRC).
- Nguyen, D.H.; Schneider, T.; Duret, G.; Kshirsagar, A.; Belousov, B.; Peters, J. (2025). TacEx: GelSight Tactile Simulation in Isaac Sim – Combining Soft-Body and Visuotactile Simulators, German Robotics Conference (GRC).
- Vincent, T.; Faust, T.; Tripathi, Y.; Peters, J.; D'Eramo, C. (2025). Eau De Q-Network: Adaptive Distillation of Neural Networks in Deep Reinforcement Learning, Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM).
- Pompetzki, K.; Le, A. T.; Gruner, T.; Watson, J.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Peters, J. (2025). Geometrically-Aware Goal Inference: Leveraging Motion Planning as Inference, German Robotics Conference (GRC).
- Lenz, J.; Pfenning, I.; Gruner, T.; Palenicek, D.; Schneider, T.; Peters, J. (2025). Exploring the Role of Vision and Touch in Reinforcement Learning for Dexterous Insertion Tasks, Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (RLDM).
- Celik, O.; Li, Z.; Blessing, D.; Li, G.; Palenicek, D.; Peters, J.; Chalvatzaki, G.; Neumann, G. (2025). Diffusion-Based Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning, 7th Robot Learning Workshop: Towards Robots with Human-Level Abilities (ICLR).
- Scherer, C. F.; Tölle, M.; Gruner, T.; Palenicek, D.; Schneider, T.; Schramowski, P.; Belousov, B.; Peters, J. (2025). AllmAN: A German Vision-Language-Action Model, German Robotics Conference (GRC).
- Toelle, M.; Gruner, T.; Palenicek, D.; Guenster, J.; Liu, P.; Watson, J.; Tateo, D.; Peters, J. (2025). Towards Safe Robot Foundation Models, German Robotics Conference (GRC).
- Schneider, T.; de Farias, C.; Calandra, R.; Chen L.; Peters, J. (2025). Active Perception for Tactile Sensing: A Task-Agnostic Attention-Based Approach, German Robotics Conference (GRC).
- Bohlinger, N.; Kinzel, J.; Palenicek, D.; Antczak, L.; Peters, J. (2025). Gait in Eight: Efficient On-Robot Learning for Omnidirectional Quadruped Locomotion, Under review.
- Stasica, M.; Bick, A.; Bohlinger, N.; Mohseni, O.; Fritzsche, J.; Hübler, C.; Peters, J.; Seyfarth, A. (2025). Bridge the Gap: Enhancing Quadruped Locomotion with Vertical Ground Perturbations, Under review.
- Le, A.T.; Pompetzki, K.; Peters, J.; Biess, A. (2025). Kinematics Correspondence As Inexact Graph Matching, German Robotics Conference (GRC).
- Koosha, T. A.; Kshirsagar, A.; Augustat, N.; Hahne, F.; Mühl, D.; Melzig, C. A.; Bremmer, F.; Peters, J.; Endres, D. M. (2025). Staring Down the Elevator Shaft: Postural Responses to Virtual Heights in an Indoor Environment, Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci).
- Chowdhury, A.; Maurer, H.; Kshirsagar, A.; Ploeger, K.; Peters, J.; Mueller, H. (2025). The Earlier You Know, the Smoother You Act, Conference of the Human Movement Science Section of the German Association of Sports Science.
Privately, Jan Peters enjoys Adventures, Sailing, and Skiing.