Robot Learning: Control and Interaction in the Real World

The growing capabilities of learning-based methods in control and robotics has precipitated a shift in the design of software for autonomous systems. Recent successes fuel the hope that robots will increasingly perform varying tasks working alongside humans in complex, dynamic environments. However, the application of learning approaches to real-world robotic systems has been limited because real-world scenarios introduce challenges that do not arise in simulation.
In this workshop, we aim to identify and tackle the main challenges to learning on real robotic systems. First, most machine learning methods rely on large quantities of labeled data. While raw sensor data is available at high rates, the required variety is hard to obtain and the human effort to annotate or design reward functions is an even larger burden. Second, algorithms must guarantee some measure of safety and robustness to be deployed in real systems that interact with property and people. Instantaneous reset mechanisms, as common in simulation to recover from even critical failures, present a great challenge to real robots. Third, the real world is significantly more complex and varied than curated datasets and simulations. Successful approaches must scale to this complexity and be able to adapt to novel situations.