Dieter Büchler
About
Dieter Büchler is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Amii and an assistant professor in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta. His research group advances robotics by leveraging soft, compliant designs and learning to achieve human-like motor skills. Adopting a holistic approach, they design robots optimized for learning rather than traditional control, a philosophy that has enabled their soft, muscular robots to master dynamic tasks—such as returning and smashing table tennis balls—using end-to-end reinforcement learning. Büchler’s research group will explore various facets of robot learning research and integrate the robotic body as an additional degree of freedom to tackle complex, real-world challenges.
Awards
- Best Paper Award, IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation (ICRA), 2024
- Award of the Family Klee Foundation, 2014
- Member & Foreign Studies Award, German Academic Scholarship Foundation, 2010, 2012
Relevant Publications
- Büchler, D., Guist, S., Calandra, R., Berenz, V., Schölkopf, B., & Peters, J. (2022). “Learning to play table tennis from scratch using muscular robots.” IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 38(6), 3850-3860.
- Guist, S., Schneider, J., Ma, H., Chen, L., Berenz, V., Martus, J., ... & Büchler, D. (2024). “Safe & Accurate at Speed with Tendons: A Robot Arm for Exploring Dynamic Motion.” Robotics Science & Systems (R:SS).
- Schneider, J., Schumacher, P., Guist, S., Chen, L., Häufle, D., Schölkopf, B., & Büchler, D. (2024). “Identifying policy gradient subspaces.” International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).
- Zhao, Y., Chen, L., Schneider, J., Gao, Q., Kannala, J., Schölkopf, B., ... & Büchler, D. (2024). “RP1M: A Large-Scale Motion Dataset for Piano Playing with Bi-Manual Dexterous Robot Hands.” Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL).
- Guist, S., Schneider, J., Dittrich, A., Berenz, V., Schölkopf, B., & Büchler, D. (2023). “Hindsight states: Blending sim and real task elements for efficient reinforcement learning.” Robotics Science & Systems (R:SS).