Robots: Learning

Posted 20 Nov 2009 at 10:45 UTC by mwaibel

The latest episode of the Robots podcast interviews two experts in robot learning. Andrea Thomaz from Georgia Tech studies how humans teach and how humanoids learn with the goal to improve human-robot interaction. Among other things, Thomaz has designed her own humanoid robot Simon shown in the video above (have a look at this non-youtube video to see Simon's expressive ears in action). Our second guest Sethu Vijayakumar from the University of Edinburgh has done an astonishing amount of work spanning the fields of statistical machine learning, human motor control, Bayesian inference techniques and computational neuroscience. In the interview Vijayakumar speaks about the similarities and differences between human and machine learning, and explains how robots can learn about their environment through physical interactions. Read on and tune in!