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Chenggang Liu's Homepage

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Research Interest

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My life goal is to endow robots with the dexterity, robustness and autonomy of animals and humans and enable them to work in diverse fields such as human working&living environment and degraded environments. In practice, I'd like to design robots that can understand the tasks, the environment, and themselves; learn from humans and other creatures; and execute their tasks in such an elegant and efficient way that they can outperform their teachers.

Optimal control and reinforcement learning are the main focus of my research.

We begin not with a sensory stimulus, but with a sensorimotor co-ordination … In a certain sense it is the movement which is primary, and the sensation which is secondary, the movement of the body, head, and eye muscles determining the quality of what is experienced – Dewey, 1898

I believe perception, prediction and motion planning are tightly coupled with each other and we can't solve AI problems by regarding them as information processing problems, but instead, we need to have a physical robot and let it gain knowledge and intelligence from the interaction with the physical world.

The laws of movement and of rest deduced from this principle being precisely the same as those observed in nature, we can admire the application of it to all phenomena. The movement of animals, the vegetative growth of plants … are only its consequences; and the spectacle of the universe becomes so much the grander, so much more beautiful, the worthier of its Author, when one knows that a small number of laws, most wisely established, suffice for all movements. – Pierre Louis Maupertuis

Although full of chaos, the world is governed by optimality principle. The optimality is so ubiquitous that it remains central in thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, particle physics, string theory, optics, so and so. Thanks to mankind's great scientists, Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Willian Rowan Hamilton, Lev Pontryagin, Richard Bellman, Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, and etc. , we have powerful mathematical weapons to formulate these problems and thanks to advanced hardware, we can solve these problems in our generation.

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