Page 4 - Rapid Learning in Robotics

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Foreword

The rapid and apparently effortless adaptation of their movements to a
broad spectrum of conditions distinguishes both humans and animals in
an important way even from nowadays most sophisticated robots. Algo-
rithms for rapid learning will, therefore, become an important prerequisite
for future robots to achieve a more intelligent coordination of their move-
ments that is closer to the impressive level of biological performance.
The present book discusses many of the issues that are important to
make learning approaches in robotics more feasible. A new learning al-
gorithm, the Parameterized Self-Organizing Maps, is derived from a model
of neural self-organization. It has a number of benefits that make it par-
ticularly suited for applications in the field of robotics. A key feature of
the new method is the rapid construction of even highly non-linear vari-
able relations from rather modestly-sized training data sets by exploiting
topology information that is unused in the more traditional approaches.
In addition, the author shows how this approach can be used in a mod-
ular fashion, leading to a learning architecture for the acquisition of basic
skills during an “investment learning” phase, and, subsequently, for their
rapid combination to adapt to new situational contexts.
The author demonstrates the potential of these approaches with an im-
pressive number of carefully chosen and thoroughly discussed examples,
covering such central issues as learning of various kinematic transforms,
dealing with constraints, object pose estimation, sensor fusion and camera
calibration. It is a distinctive feature of the treatment that most of these
examples are discussed and investigated in the context of their actual im-
plementations on real robot hardware. This, together with the wide range
of included topics, makes the book a valuable source for both the special-
ist, but also the non-specialist reader with a more general interest in the
fields of neural networks, machine learning and robotics.

Helge Ritter
Bielefeld