Seminar: Robot Learning

Organizer:
Prof. Dr. Abhinav Valada

Co-Organizers:
Markus Käppeler Niclas Vödisch Eugenio Chisari Nick Heppert

Deep learning has become a key enabler of real world autonomous systems. Due to the significant advancement in deep learning, these systems are able to learn various tasks end-to-end, including for perception, state estimation, and control, thereby making important progress in object manipulation, scene understanding, visual recognition, object tracking, and learning-based control, amongst others. In this seminar, we will study a selection of state-of-the-art works that propose deep learning techniques for tackling various challenges in autonomous systems. In particular, we will analyze contributions in architecture design, and techniques selection that also include computer vision, reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and self-supervised learning.

Course Information

Details:	Course Number: 11LE13S-7317-M Places: 12 Room 00.021, building 080
Course Program:	Introduction: 18/10/2024 @ 13:00 How to make a presentation: 10/01/2025 @ 13:00 Block Seminar: 07/02/2025 @ 09:00
Evaluation Program:	Seminar Presentation: 07/02/2025 @ 09:00 Summary Due Date: 21/02/2025 @ 23:59
Requirements:	Basic knowledge of Deep Learning or Reinforcement Learning
Remarks:	Topics will be assigned for the seminar via a preference voting. If there are more interested students than places, places will be assigned based on priority suggestions of the HisInOne system and motivation. The date of registration is irrelevant. In particular, we want to avoid that students grab a topic and then leave the seminar. Please have a coarse look at all available papers to make an informed decision before you commit.

Course Material

Slides:	Lecture 1: Introduction Lecture 2: tbd
Templates:	Summary Presentation

Additional Information

Enrollment Procedure

Enroll through HISinOne, the course number is 11LE13S-7317-M.
The registration period for the seminars is from 14/10/2024 to 21/10/2024.
Attend the introductory session on 18/10/2024.
Select three papers from the topic list and complete this form by 21/10/2024.
Places will be assigned based on priority suggestions of HISInOne and motivation of the student on 24/10/2024.

Evaluation Details

Students are expected to prepare a 20-minute long presentation and draft a summary.
The seminar will be held as a "Blockseminar".
The slides of your presentation should be discussed with the supervisor two weeks before the Blockseminar.
The summary should not exceed seven pages (excluding bibliography and figures). Significantly longer summaries will not be accepted.
Ensure you cite all work you use including images and illustrations. Where possible, try to use your own illustrations.
The final grade is based on the oral presentation, the summary, and participation in the blockseminar.

What should the Summary contain?

The summary should address the following questions:

What is the paper's main contribution and why is it important?
How does it relate to other techniques in the literature?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the paper?
What would be some interesting follow-up work? Can you suggest any possible improvements in the proposed methods? Are there any further interesting applications that the authors might have overlooked?

Graded Component Submission

Save your document as a PDF and directly submit it to your topic supervisor via email.
The filename should be in the format "FirstName_LastName_X.pdf" where X is the evaluation component (Abstract / Summary / Presentation).

Topics

Questions?

If you have any questions, please direct them to Markus Käppeler before the topic allotment, and to your supervisor after you have received your topic.