Journal of Machine Learning Research 22 (2021) 1-82 Submitted 9/19; Revised 8/20; Published 1/21 A Review of Robot Learning for Manipulation: Challenges, Representations, and Algorithms Oliver Kroemer∗
[email protected] School of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA Scott Niekum
[email protected] Department of Computer Science The University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712, USA George Konidaris
[email protected] Department of Computer Science Brown University Providence, RI 02912, USA Editor: Daniel Lee Abstract A key challenge in intelligent robotics is creating robots that are capable of directly in- teracting with the world around them to achieve their goals. The last decade has seen substantial growth in research on the problem of robot manipulation, which aims to exploit the increasing availability of affordable robot arms and grippers to create robots capable of directly interacting with the world to achieve their goals. Learning will be central to such autonomous systems, as the real world contains too much variation for a robot to expect to have an accurate model of its environment, the objects in it, or the skills required to manipulate them, in advance. We aim to survey a representative subset of that research which uses machine learning for manipulation. We describe a formalization of the robot manipulation learning problem that synthesizes existing research into a single coherent framework and highlight the many remaining research opportunities and challenges. Keywords: manipulation, learning, review, robots, MDPs 1. Introduction Robot manipulation is central to achieving the promise of robotics|the very definition of a robot requires that it has actuators, which it can use to effect change on the world.