PhD Thesis Proposal

Abstract: General purpose robots should be able to perform arbitrary manipulation tasks, and get better at performing new ones as they obtain more experience. The current paradigm in robot learning involves imitation or simulation. Scaling these approaches to learn from more data for various tasks is bottle-necked by human labor required either in collecting demonstrations [...]

Abstract: To solve general manipulation tasks in real-world environments, robots must be able to perceive and condition their manipulation policies on the 3D world. These agents will need to understand various common-sense spatial/geometric concepts about manipulation tasks: that local geometry can suggest potential manipulation strategies, that policies should be invariant across choice of reference frame, [...]