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From Classical to Learning-Based Robotics

This chapter ties the classical tools you’ve learned to the motivations for learning‑based methods, then points you to what comes next. We’ll keep it concise and add signposts so you know where to focus.

> Don’t worry if this page is a bit dense, we’ll break it down in the next few units.

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What We’ve Learned So Far

First, a quick recap of the important concepts covered across the foundational units.

Motivation for Learning-Based Robotics: You’ve explored the fundamental shift occurring in robotics today, moving from classical model-based approaches toward data-driven learning methods. We’ve established why robot learning is becoming essential for creating more capable and generalizable robotic systems, and how tools like LeRobot are making these advanced techniques accessible to a broader community of researchers and practitioners.

LeRobot Ecosystem: You’ve gained a fundamental understanding of LeRobot’s approach to robotics. This includes understanding the vision behind LeRobot as an end-to-end robotics library, aiming at integrating the different aspects of robotics altogether. You have also learned about the LeRobotDataset format, which handles the complexity of multi-modal robotics data, and got practical experience with loading and processing real robotics datasets for machine learning applications.

Next, you will learn how to synthetize autonomous control behaviors directly from data, and deploy them on real-world robots using lerobot.

Classical Robotics Foundations: We’ve examined the traditional approaches to robotics in detail, covering different types of robot motion including manipulation, locomotion, and mobile manipulation. You’ve learned about forward and inverse kinematics, differential kinematics, and feedback control systems. Most importantly, you’ve developed an understanding of why classical approaches, despite their mathematical rigor, struggle with the complexity and variability of real-world robotic applications.

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The Learning Revolution

Through our exploration of classical robotics, you’ve gained a clear understanding of why learning-based approaches represent such a significant advancement in the field.

Classical approaches face fundamental limitations that become apparent when dealing with real-world complexity. These methods require extensive mathematical modeling of every aspect of the robot’s environment and interactions, which becomes prohibitively difficult for complex scenarios.

They struggle to integrate multi-modal data sources like vision, touch, and proprioception in a unified way. Perhaps most importantly, classical approaches don’t scale well across different tasks or robot embodiments—each new application typically requires significant re-engineering and expert knowledge.

Learning-based approaches offer compelling advantages that directly address these limitations. Instead of requiring experts to model every aspect of the problem, these methods can learn appropriate behaviors and representations directly from data.

They naturally handle multi-modal, high-dimensional inputs through neural network architectures designed for such complexity, can generalize across different tasks and even different robot embodiments, and scale with the availability of data and computational resources.

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What’s Coming Next

The foundational knowledge you’ve gained prepares you for the advanced topics that follow.

Reinforcement Learning for Robotics will explore how robots can learn optimal behaviors through trial and error interactions with their environment. You’ll learn about designing appropriate reward signals for robotics tasks, understand reinforcement learning methods that enable robots to improve their performance over time, and tackle the crucial challenge of sample efficiency—learning effectively with limited real-world interaction data. We’ll also cover how LeRobot implements these reinforcement learning algorithms in practice.

Imitation Learning via Behavioral Cloning will demonstrate how robots can acquire complex skills by observing and copying expert demonstrations. This approach is particularly valuable because it allows robots to learn from real-world human expertise without requiring explicit reward engineering, sidestepping the criticalities associated with using RL in practice. You’ll understand how to handle the distribution shift problem that occurs when robots encounter situations not seen in training data, explore advanced imitation learning techniques beyond simple behavioral cloning, and gain practical experience implementing these methods using LeRobot’s tools.

Foundation Models for Robotics will cover the cutting-edge developments that are creating more general and capable robotic systems. You’ll explore how multi-task learning enables knowledge sharing across different robotic platforms and tasks, understand language-conditioned policies that allow robots to follow natural language instructions, and learn about scaling laws that govern how performance improves with larger models and datasets. This section will prepare you to understand and contribute to the development of truly generalist robotic systems.

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Practical Skills Gained

Through this foundational section of the course, you’ve developed both technical capabilities and conceptual understanding that will serve as the foundation for more advanced topics.

Technical Skills: You now understand how robotics data differs from traditional machine learning datasets and why specialized formats are necessary. You’ve gained practical experience working with the LeRobotDataset API, including loading and processing multi-modal robotics data that combines vision, proprioception, and action information. You’ve also learned about streaming large datasets efficiently, which is crucial for working with the massive datasets that power modern robot learning systems.

Conceptual Understanding: Perhaps most importantly, you’ve developed a clear mental model of the evolution occurring in robotics today. You understand the historical context of classical approaches, their mathematical foundations, and their fundamental limitations when applied to complex, real-world scenarios. You’ve gained insight into how learning-based approaches address these limitations and why the availability of large-scale robotics data is transforming what’s possible in the field.

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Ready for the Next Challenge?

> You’re now ready for advanced robot learning! The concepts you’ve learned about data handling, multi-modal processing, and the limitations of classical approaches will be essential as we dive into:

> - Reinforcement Learning - How robots learn optimal behaviors through trial and error
> - Imitation Learning - How robots learn by watching human demonstrations
> - Foundation Models - How large-scale models are creating general-purpose robotic intelligence

> Coming soon: These advanced units will build directly on the foundations you’ve just mastered.

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Course Summary

- Robot learning represents a paradigm shift from model-based to data-driven approaches
- LeRobot democratizes access to state-of-the-art robot learning techniques
- Classical robotics provides important foundations but has fundamental scalability limitations
- Learning-based methods can generalize across tasks, robots, and environments
- The future lies in combining classical insights with learning capabilities
- Large-scale datasets and foundation models are transforming what’s possible in robotics

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Community and Resources

As you continue your robot learning journey:

Keep Learning:

- Explore LeRobot documentation
- Try LeRobot examples
- Give a read to our in-detail tutorial
- Join the community discussions

Get Involved:

- Contribute datasets to the community
- Share your robot learning experiments
- Help improve LeRobot tools and documentation

> If you’re choosing a first project, start with a small imitation learning task using LeRobotDataset (pick‑and‑place on SO‑100/SO‑101). You’ll get end‑to‑end experience—data, model, evaluation—without needing reward design or simulators.

Congratulations on completing the foundational units! You’re now ready to dive into the exciting world of learning-based robotics algorithms.

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References

For a full list of references, check out the tutorial.

- End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies (2016)
  Sergey Levine et al.
  A landmark paper demonstrating how deep learning can be used for direct visuomotor control, bypassing traditional perception and planning modules. This represents a key step in the transition from classical to learning-based robotics.
  arXiv:1504.00702

- Learning Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation (2018)
  OpenAI et al.
  This paper demonstrates how reinforcement learning with domain randomization can solve complex manipulation tasks that would be extremely difficult to program using classical methods, highlighting the advantages of learning-based approaches.
  arXiv:1808.00177

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Final Chapter Quiz

Test your understanding of the Classical Robotics unit. Choose the best answer for each question.

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1. Which set best categorizes types of robot motion discussed in this unit?

Navigation, mapping, and planning Manipulation, locomotion, and mobile manipulation Simulation, perception, and control End-effector, joints, and sensors

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2. What is the essential difference between forward kinematics (FK) and inverse kinematics (IK)?

FK maps joint angles to end-effector pose, whereas IK maps a desired pose to joint angles FK is about velocities and IK is about positions FK is only for 2‑DoF robots IK is always faster to compute than FK

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3. In differential kinematics, what does the Jacobian J(q) represent?

A mapping from joint velocities to end‑effector velocities A mapping from end‑effector positions to joint torques The feasible workspace of the robot A motion planner for obstacle avoidance

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4. The closed‑form differential IK solution uses J(q)^+. What does the superscript ’+’ denote?

The Moore–Penrose pseudo‑inverse The transpose of the Jacobian The determinant of the Jacobian The adjugate of the Jacobian

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5. How do obstacles and joint limits affect IK in the planar manipulator example?

They restrict the feasible set of configurations and make IK harder They have no effect on IK solutions They only change the FK mapping They guarantee a unique IK solution

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6. Which statement best characterizes classical robotics pipelines as presented in this unit?

They are modular stacks with fixed interfaces (perception, state estimation, planning, control) They are single end‑to‑end learned policies They do not require expert tuning They inherently integrate raw high‑dimensional inputs

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7. Which set lists the core limitations highlighted for dynamics‑based approaches?

Integration challenges, limited scalability, modeling limitations, and overlooking data trends Cost, accuracy, speed, and energy consumption Hardware reliability, software licensing, and safety standards Planner optimality, sensor calibration, and actuator wear

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8. What key advantage of learning‑based approaches is emphasized as a contrast to classical methods?

They can learn end‑to‑end from data and generalize across tasks/embodiments They eliminate the need for sensors They require no compute resources They do not need datasets

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9. Why does the availability of open robotics datasets matter in this unit’s context?

It enables learning‑based methods to scale and transfer knowledge It reduces manufacturing costs of robot arms It removes the need for control theory entirely It guarantees perfect generalization
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