Note: Okan Koc has transitioned from the institute (alumni).
I am currently a guest scientist at MPI for Intelligent Systems, where I conduct research on safe robot learning. Previously (2014-2018) I was a PhD student working with Jan Peters in the Robot Learning Lab, where two 7-DoF Barrett arms are facing each other, awaiting eagerly for the day when they can beat each other in a deadly robot table tennis match. So far that has not happened! I think that in order to learn from scratch, one needs to look at how robots could learn safely without extensive prior knowledge or assumptions!
During my PhD I was working on optimal trajectory generation for table tennis and learning control algorithms (that are applicable to table tennis). I am especially interested in optimal control and reinforcement learning.
Learning control Table tennis Robotics Optimal Control Optimization