Robotic exploration of the Martian surface will provide important scientific data on planetary climate, life history, and geologic resources. In particular, robotic arms will assist in the detailed visual inspection, instrumented analysis, extraction, and earth return of soil and rock samples. To this end, we are developing new robotic manipulation concepts for use on landers and rovers, wherei...

The combinatorial stochastic semi-bandit problem is an extension of the classical multi-armed bandit problem in which an algorithm pulls more than one arm at each stage and the rewards of all pulled arms are revealed. One difference with the single arm variant is that the dependency structure of the arms is crucial. Previous works on this setting either used a worst-case approach or imposed ind...