Page 153 - Rapid Learning in Robotics

Chapter 10

Summary

The main concern of this work is the development and investigation of
new building blocks aiming at rapid and efficient learning. We chose
the domain of continuous, high-dimensional, non-linear mapping tasks,
as they often play an important role in sensorimotor transformations in
the field of robotics.
The design of better re-usable building blocks, not only adaptive neural
network modules, but also hardware, as well as software modules can
be considered as the desire for efficient learning in a broader sense. The
construction of those building blocks is driven by the given experimental
situation. Similar to a training exercise, the procedural knowledge of, for
example, interacting with a device is usually incorporated in a building
block, e.g. a piece of software. The criterion to call this activity “learning”
is whether this “knowledge” can be later used, more precisely, re-used in
form of “association” or “generalization” in a new, previously unexpected
application situation.
The first part of this work was directed at the robotics infrastructure
investment: the building and development of a test and research platform
around an industrial robot manipulator Puma 560 and a hydraulic multi-
finger hand. We were particularly concerned about the interoperability
of the complex hardware by general purpose Unix computers in order to
gain the flexibility needed to interface the robots to distributed informa-
tion processing architectures.
For more intelligent and task-oriented action schemata the availabil-
ity of fast and robust sensory environment feedback is a limiting factor.
Nevertheless, we encountered a significant lack in suitable and commer-

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