On February 2nd, 2018, Ajay Tanwani successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled 'Generative Models for Learning Robot Manipulation Skills from Humans'

The thesis presents generative mixture models for learning robot manipulation skills from a few human demonstrations, and providing assistance to a human operator in performing these skills at a distance under limited bandwidth and communication delays. The models are based on invariant task-parameterized representations of hidden semi-Markov models that allow segmentation and reproduction of manipulation skills, while generalizing effectively across different environmental situations such as size, position, and orientation of objects in the environment.