Learning control of complex skills

Abstract

This dissertation presents a hierarchical controller which can learn to perform complex motor skills. Humans routinely coordinate many degrees of freedom smoothly and effortlessly to achieve complex goals. Moreover, we are good at learning new patterns of coordination to produce new skills. Robots and artificial systems, on the other hand, typically have difficulty with the kinds of behaviors that come most naturally to us. Skills such as running, skiing, playing basketball, or diving involve complex nonlinear dynamics, many degrees of freedom, and behavioral goals that can be difficult to specify mathematically; goals such as "ski down the mountain without falling down" or "shoot a layup" must be translated from linguistic requirements into dynamic system constraints. The focus in this dissertation will be on the skill...