Research Statement
New areas such as humanoid and service robotics require that modern robots need to act in unstructured environments where the robot system needs to be capable of adapting to its surroundings. As a result, methods from machine learning will increasingly be needed in order to create more autonomous robots. My research centers around robot learning approaches for the physical interactions with objects. Here, grasping and manipulation of unmodeled, novel objects remains one of the key problems in order to bring robots into human-inhabited environments. In order to find suitable solutions to such manipulation problems, we develop domain-oriented machine learning approaches. These include active learning of vision-based grasping, reinforcement learning for preshaping of grasping movements as well as learning long-term plans for object manipulation.
Current Position
Ph.D. student with scholarship at Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics
Topic: Learning Grasping and Manipulation for Robotics
Supervisor: Dr. Jan Peters
Dept.: Empirical Inference and Machine Learning (Dept.Head: Bernhard Schölkopf)
Educational Background | |||
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2008-now | Ph.D. Student | ||
supervised by Dr. Jan Peters | |||
Dept. Empirical Inference (Dept.Head: Bernhard Schölkopf), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany | |||
2007-2008 | Master's thesis | ||
supervised by Prof. Daniel Wolpert | |||
Dept. Engineering at Cambridge University | |||
Thesis Title: Design and Implementation of a One Degree-of-Freedom Robotic Elbow Orthosis | |||
2004-2008 | M.Eng. and B.A. in Engineering | ||
Cambridge University, England | |||
Internships | |||
2008 | Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics | ||
System Integration of a Robot Hand-Eye System | |||
Empirical Inference and Machine Learning Department | |||
Supervisor: Dr. Jan Peters | |||
2007 | Oceaneering Norway | ||
Electronics and MIMIC Simulation | |||
Supervisor: Jan Inge | |||
2006 | Cambridge University Engineering Department | ||
Undergraduate Research Oppurtunity Placement (U.R.O.P.) in Sensorimotor Control Group | |||
Supervisor: Prof. Daniel Wolpert | |||
Awards and Honors | |||
2008 | Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers Award | ||
Group F Thesis Presentation Award | |||
Trinity College Tripos Award | |||
2007 | Trinity College Tripos Award | ||
2006 | Senior Scholar and Trinity College Tripos Award | ||
2005 | Junior Scholar and Trinity College Tripos Award | ||
2004 | Undergraduate European Student Scholarship Trinity College | ||
Undergraduate Scholarship of I.Mech.E. (Institution of Mechanical Engineers, UK) | |||
E.C.I.S. (European Council of International Schools) UK Award | |||
Paper Reviewing | |||
2009 | Autonomous Robots Journal | ||
2008 | IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2009) | ||
References, etc. | |||
References are available upon request. |