Undergraduate Research & Scholarships

Justin Fu Rose Hills

Learning Contact-Rich Tasks with Haptic Input

Robots are typically deployed in highly controlled environments, but for robots to become usable in everyday situations, they must be able to learn to adapt to the environment. Reinforcement learning is a popular framework in robotics for teaching robots motor skills in unknown environments through a trial-and-error process. Recently, methods have been developed that allow optimization of high-dimensional control policies, which enables the use of powerful tools from machine learning such as neural networks to decide on which actions the robot should take and when. My project involves using various types of neural networks in tandem with high-dimensional sensor data (such as pressure, torque, and visual) to learn manipulation tasks.

Message To Sponsor

I am grateful to the SURF/Rose Hills fellowship for giving me the ability to fully dedicate my post-graduation summer to research. This experience is valuable to me as it lets me grow as a researcher and allows me to apply the knowledge I have gained during my undergraduate education at Berkeley to contribute the the exciting field of robotics and machine learning. I would like to thank the SURF/Rose Hills foundation and my mentor, Pieter Abbeel, for this opportunity.