How Many Ways Can You Teach a Robot?

The human brain is wired to be able to learn new things--and in all kinds of different ways, from imitating others to watching online explainer videos. What if robots could do the same thing? It is a question that ACM Prize recipient Pieter Abbeel, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, has spent his career researching. Here, we speak with Abbeel about his work and about the techniques he has developed to make it easier to teach robots. Let's start with deep reinforcement learning and the method you developed called Trust Region Policy Optimization.