Matthew J. W. Howard

Welcome to my homepage! I am a Senior Lecturer in Engineering in the Department of Engineering, School of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences at King's College, London & a member of the Centre for Robotics Research (CoRe) where I lead the Robot Learning Lab.

Biography

I joined King's in 2013. Prior to this, I was a JSPS postdoctoral research fellow at the Y. Nakamura Lab, in the Department of Mechano-Informatics, at the University of Tokyo, and a member of the Statistical Machine Learning and Motor Control group, in the Institute for Perception, Action and Behaviour in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. At Edinburgh, I was involved in the European STIFF Project investigating various aspects of human and robotic impedance control. I completed my PhD in July 2009 under the supervision of Prof. Sethu Vijayakumar, where I worked in collaboration with the Honda Research Institute Europe in Offenbach, Germany.

Me

Photo Credit: Charlie Forgham Bailey


Research

My primary research interests are machine learning for control, especially as applied to robotics. This includes learning kinematics and dynamics, approximate optimal control and reinforcement learning. A central theme of my work is on transfer of behaviour from humans to robots, especially at the level of dynamic motor control. Other words for this arer adaptive control, imitation learning or programming by demonstration. My group and I work at all stages of the transfer pipe-line, from design of wearable sensors for capturing behaviourial data, machine learning algorithms for forming models of behaviour, control algorithms and actuator mechatronics for implementing behaviour on robots. My contributions include data-driven methods to generalise task-oriented behaviour across systems with different dynamics, where those differences may be in terms of the constraints, the actuation or other differences in dynamics. It also relates to the control of redundancy in both the kinematics, dynamics and actuation.

Contact Me

Address:




Department of Engineering,
Strand Campus, Room S2.47
King's College London,
Strand,
London, WC2R 2LS
United Kingdom
Tel.:+44 (0) 20 7848 7578
E-mail:

Keywords ... autogenerated according to word frequencies in publications.

Keywords

Tweets

Teaching

This year I am teaching 4CCS1PHC Physical Computing and 6CCS3RSC/7CCSMRTS Real-time Systems and Control. If you have any questions about the material, you can send me an e-mail or come to see me during my office hours.

Videos

Open Access

Software

See my GitHub for open source projects. The CCL Library and LWPR (on SourceForge) can be downloaded for free!


Data

See my publications and my Figshare page for open access data sets available for download.