In most activities of daily living, related tasks are encountered over and over again. Countless times we flip light switches, insert keys in locks, pour coffee, brush our teeth, etc. etc. To exploit this regularity, humans reuse existing motor skills for recurring tasks. For robots, using a set of motor skills also drastically reduces the search space for control, facilitates learning, leads to less reliance on accurate analytical models, and has negligible computational load during execution. Therefore, my goal is to leverage the advantages of the skill-centric approach to achieve autonomous robots that operate flexibly, robustly and safely in human environments.

⇒ More detailed research description

⇒ Former research projects

	Freek Stulp and Stefan Schaal. Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Motion Primitives. In 11th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, 2011. Details     Download: [pdf] (1.7MB )
	F. Stulp, A. Fedrizzi, L. Mösenlechner, and M. Beetz. Learning and Reasoning with Action-Related Places for Robust Mobile Manipulation. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 2012. Accepted for publication Details
	J. Buchli, F. Stulp, E. Theodorou, and S. Schaal. Learning Variable Impedance Control. International Journal of Robotics Research, 30(7):820–833, 2011. Details
	M. Beetz, F. Stulp, et al. Generality and Legibility in Mobile Manipulation - Learning Skills for Routine Tasks. Autonomous Robots: Special Issue on Autonomous Mobile Manipulation, 28(1):21–44, January 2010. Details
	F. Stulp and M. Beetz. Refining the execution of abstract actions with learned action models. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), 32, June 2008. Details
	Matthias Wimmer, Freek Stulp, Sylvia Pietzsch, and Bernd Radig. Learning Local Objective Functions for Robust Face Model Fitting. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), 30(8), 2008. Details

⇒ Full publication list

⇒ In public media

⇒ Full CV (PDF)

Check out my former bands "Minor Problems" and "The Unknown Host". Here are some other bands I was in as well.

I'm also into salsa (see this rehearsal for a Rueda demo), and more recently tango argentina.

⇒ More info

Freekuently Asked Question: The not uncommon dutch name "Freek" is pronounced "Frrrake" (with a Spanish-style "r" as in "burro"). Don't worry, I'm not fussy about this: over the years abroad I have also learned to respond to "Frank", "Fred", "Vague", "Flake", "Flag", "Freoch", and "Freak" (actually, in Britain, an institute where I worked addressed letters to me as "Dr. Freak", though at the time I was neither. In Japan on the other hand, people do much better at spelling my name correctly. Contrary to the well-known English meaning, the original lesser-known Dutch meaning is "powerful protector". For completeness: "Stulp" means "humble abode".