Towards Robot Skill Learning: From Simple Skills to Table Tennis

Learning robots that can acquire new motor skills and refine existing ones have been a long-standing vision of both robotics, and machine learning. However, off-the-shelf machine learning appears not to be adequate for robot skill learning, as it neither scales to anthropomorphic robotics nor do fulfills the crucial real-time requirements. As an alternative, we propose to divide the generic skill learning problem into parts that can be well-understood from a robotics point of view. In this context, we have developed machine learning methods applicable to robot skill learning. This paper discusses recent progress ranging from simple skill learning problems to a game of robot table tennis.