On the New Generation of Bio-Inspired Robots

Robots can only contribute to our lives with full potential when they can learn efficiently, generalize to a variety of tasks, and operate in challenging environments. Here, Ali will discuss some of the solutions that biology has found to address these challenges and elaborate on how we can apply them to our robots. In particular, he will talk about learning to perform functional movements without prior knowledge of the system and only with limited experience in the physical world. The effects of simple kinematic feedback on both performance and learning speed will also be discussed. Lastly plots and videos for both simulation and physical system implementations will be provided.