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PhD Speaking Qualifier

September

20
Tue
Shikhar Bahl PhD Student Robotics Institute,
Carnegie Mellon University
Tuesday, September 20
10:30 am to 11:30 am
NSH 4305
Human-to-Robot Imitation in the Wild

Abstract: In this talk, I approach the problem of learning by watching humans in the wild. While traditional approaches in Imitation and Reinforcement Learning are promising for learning in the real world, they are either sample inefficient or are constrained to lab settings. Meanwhile, there has been a lot of success in processing passive, unstructured human data. We propose tackling this problem via an efficient one-shot robot learning algorithm, centered around learning from a third-person perspective. We call our method WHIRL: In-the-Wild Human Imitating Robot Learning. WHIRL extracts a prior over the intent of the human demonstrator, using it to initialize our agent’s policy. We introduce an efficient real-world policy learning scheme that improves using interactions. The key contributions of WHIRL are: a simple sampling-based policy optimization approach, a novel objective function for aligning human and robot videos as well as an exploration method to boost sample efficiency. WHIRL shows one-shot generalization and success in real-world settings, including 20 different manipulation tasks in the wild.

Committee:
Deepak Pathak
Abhinav Gupta
Oliver Kroemer
Jacky Liang