Safe Robot Learning and Control: Challenges, Strategies, and Innovations

This presentation provides an overview of contemporary advances in safeand robotic learning frameworks. It discusses the challenges of achievingrobustness, generalization, and safety in robot learning and control. The presentation highlights advancements in learning specific skills, including repetitive periodic motions like sawing, optimizing cloth manipulation, and predicting deformable-on-rigid contact for cleaning tasks. Furthermore, it introduces novel concepts for autonomous performance evaluation, such as using "Task Fingerprints" for task classificati on and the "Digital Robot Judge" (DR. J) to benchmark robot skills against human performance on standardized task boards.