Austin Robotics & AI

This event will be held in-person at HICAM from 6 pm - 8 pm.
To join get your ticket here: https://www.hicam.io/event/austin-robotics-and-ai-april-meetup

Talk: Jiaheng Hu: Self-Improving Robots: Towards Practical Reinforcement Learning for General-Purpose Physical AI

Abstract:
The dream of general-purpose robots that can navigate and manipulate our unstructured world is often stymied by a simple reality: we don't have enough robotics data. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) offers a path forward by enabling robots to collect and learn from their own interaction data, existing approaches face significant hurdles in scalability and real-world applicability. In this talk, I will present a suite of research designed to push the frontier of scalable robotic RL. Specifically, I will introduce methods that: (1) leverage inexpensive, "imperfect" simulators to learn structured latent action representations; (2) accelerate learning from sparse feedback by integrating intrinsic motivation and behavior priors; and (3) enable continual RL across diverse, non-stationary tasks without catastrophic forgetting. Together, these contributions represent a significant step toward self-improving robotic systems that progressively expand their capabilities, moving us closer to the realization of general-purpose robotic intelligence.

Bio:
Jiaheng Hu is a 4th-year PhD student at UT-Austin, co-advised by Prof. Peter Stone and Prof. Roberto Martín-Martín. His research interest is in Robot Learning and Reinforcement Learning, with the long-term goal of developing self-improving robots that can learn and adapt autonomously in unstructured environments. Jiaheng’s work has been published at top-tier Robotics and ML venues such as CoRL, NeurIPS, RSS, and ICRA, including a best paper award at ICRA 2024. During his Ph.D., he interned at Google DeepMind and Ai2, and is a recipient of the Two Sigma Ph.D. Fellowship.

SPONSORS
A huge shout-out to HICAM for their ongoing support of our community!

Based right here in East Austin, HICAM is a premier 52,000 sq. ft. innovation hub that bridges the gap between digital AI and physical manufacturing. They provide the space, advanced tools, and expertise needed for startups to scale from prototype to production.
We are incredibly grateful for their commitment to fueling the robotics and automation ecosystem in Central Texas.

Thank you for making our monthly meetups possible!