Manuel Watter

 Scientific Staff

  Institut für Informatik
  Albert-Ludwigs-Universität
  Freiburg Georges-Koehler-Allee 080, Room 00-008
  79110 Freiburg im Breisgau

 Email: watterm@informatik.uni-freiburg.de

About me

 2007 - 2011: B.Sc. in Computer Science, University of Freiburg

 2011 - 2014: M.Sc. in Computer Science, University of Freiburg

2014 - now: PhD Student at the Robotics Grad School, Freiburg

Work

My goal is to apply data-efficient Reinforcement learning on high-dimensional state spaces e.g. camera images. Traditional RL methods can't cope with these spaces without handcrafted preprocessing methods. Recent progress in variational inference and generative models, together with a better understanding of deep neural networks, allowed us to infer locally linearized latent spaces on which linear quadratic control can be applied. The resulting Embed to Control system is able to predict trajectories in form of image sequences and control complex dynamical systems.