On machine learning and structure for s driverless cars /s mobile robots

The post coincides topically with last years' first annual Conference on Robot Learning as well as the workshop on Challenges in Robot Learning at NIPS2017, the latter we had the pleasure of co-organising together with colleagues from Oxford, DeepMind, and MIT. The events, as well as this post, cover current challenges and potentials of learning across various tasks of relevance in robotics and automation. In this context, similar to the long-term discussion on how much innate structure is optimal for artificial general intelligence, there is the more short-term question of how to merge traditional programming and learning (not sure if I prefer the branding as differentiable programming or software 2.0) for more narrow applications in efficient, robust and safe automation. The question about structure as beneficial or limiting aspect becomes arguably easier to answer in the context of robotic near-term applications as we can simply acknowledge our ignorance (our missing knowledge about what will work best in the future) and focus on the present to benchmark and combine the most efficient and effective directions. Existing solutions to many tasks in mobile robotics, such as localisation, mapping, or planning, focus on prior knowledge about the structure of our tasks and environments. This may include geometry or kinematic and dynamic models, which therefore have been built into traditional programs. However, recent successes and the flexibility of fairly unconstrained, learned models shift the focus of new academic and industrial projects. Successes in image recognition (ImageNet) as well as triumphs in reinforcement learning (Atari, Go, Chess) inspire like-minded research. As the post has become a bit of a long read, I suggest to read it like a paper: intro, discussion & conclusions and then - only if you did not fall asleep after all - the rest. Similar to scientific papers, some paragraphs will require basic familiarity with the field. However, a coarse web search should be enough to illustrate most unexplained terminology. Additionally, to keep this engaging, I have added some of my favourite recent videos highlighting interesting research for each section. Finally, this is a high-level review with more details to be found in the respective references, which just represent a small subset of available work in each field, chosen based on personal interest as well as shameless self-promotion of our work.