13,088 research outputs found
Towards the Safety of Human-in-the-Loop Robotics: Challenges and Opportunities for Safety Assurance of Robotic Co-Workers
The success of the human-robot co-worker team in a flexible manufacturing
environment where robots learn from demonstration heavily relies on the correct
and safe operation of the robot. How this can be achieved is a challenge that
requires addressing both technical as well as human-centric research questions.
In this paper we discuss the state of the art in safety assurance, existing as
well as emerging standards in this area, and the need for new approaches to
safety assurance in the context of learning machines. We then focus on robotic
learning from demonstration, the challenges these techniques pose to safety
assurance and indicate opportunities to integrate safety considerations into
algorithms "by design". Finally, from a human-centric perspective, we stipulate
that, to achieve high levels of safety and ultimately trust, the robotic
co-worker must meet the innate expectations of the humans it works with. It is
our aim to stimulate a discussion focused on the safety aspects of
human-in-the-loop robotics, and to foster multidisciplinary collaboration to
address the research challenges identified
Using humanoid robots to study human behavior
Our understanding of human behavior advances as our humanoid robotics work progresses-and vice versa. This team's work focuses on trajectory formation and planning, learning from demonstration, oculomotor control and interactive behaviors. They are programming robotic behavior based on how we humans “program” behavior in-or train-each other
Gaussian-Process-based Robot Learning from Demonstration
Endowed with higher levels of autonomy, robots are required to perform
increasingly complex manipulation tasks. Learning from demonstration is arising
as a promising paradigm for transferring skills to robots. It allows to
implicitly learn task constraints from observing the motion executed by a human
teacher, which can enable adaptive behavior. We present a novel
Gaussian-Process-based learning from demonstration approach. This probabilistic
representation allows to generalize over multiple demonstrations, and encode
variability along the different phases of the task. In this paper, we address
how Gaussian Processes can be used to effectively learn a policy from
trajectories in task space. We also present a method to efficiently adapt the
policy to fulfill new requirements, and to modulate the robot behavior as a
function of task variability. This approach is illustrated through a real-world
application using the TIAGo robot.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figure
Learning Sensor Feedback Models from Demonstrations via Phase-Modulated Neural Networks
In order to robustly execute a task under environmental uncertainty, a robot
needs to be able to reactively adapt to changes arising in its environment. The
environment changes are usually reflected in deviation from expected sensory
traces. These deviations in sensory traces can be used to drive the motion
adaptation, and for this purpose, a feedback model is required. The feedback
model maps the deviations in sensory traces to the motion plan adaptation. In
this paper, we develop a general data-driven framework for learning a feedback
model from demonstrations. We utilize a variant of a radial basis function
network structure --with movement phases as kernel centers-- which can
generally be applied to represent any feedback models for movement primitives.
To demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, we test it on the task of
scraping on a tilt board. In this task, we are learning a reactive policy in
the form of orientation adaptation, based on deviations of tactile sensor
traces. As a proof of concept of our method, we provide evaluations on an
anthropomorphic robot. A video demonstrating our approach and its results can
be seen in https://youtu.be/7Dx5imy1KcwComment: 8 pages, accepted to be published at the International Conference on
Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 201
Robot eye-hand coordination learning by watching human demonstrations: a task function approximation approach
We present a robot eye-hand coordination learning method that can directly
learn visual task specification by watching human demonstrations. Task
specification is represented as a task function, which is learned using inverse
reinforcement learning(IRL) by inferring differential rewards between state
changes. The learned task function is then used as continuous feedbacks in an
uncalibrated visual servoing(UVS) controller designed for the execution phase.
Our proposed method can directly learn from raw videos, which removes the need
for hand-engineered task specification. It can also provide task
interpretability by directly approximating the task function. Besides,
benefiting from the use of a traditional UVS controller, our training process
is efficient and the learned policy is independent from a particular robot
platform. Various experiments were designed to show that, for a certain DOF
task, our method can adapt to task/environment variances in target positions,
backgrounds, illuminations, and occlusions without prior retraining.Comment: Accepted in ICRA 201
Personalization framework for adaptive robotic feeding assistance
The final publication is available at link.springer.comThe deployment of robots at home must involve robots with pre-defined skills and the capability of
personalizing their behavior by non-expert users. A framework to tackle this personalization is presented and applied
to an automatic feeding task. The personalization involves the caregiver providing several examples of feeding using
Learning-by- Demostration, and a ProMP formalism to compute an overall trajectory and the variance along the path.
Experiments show the validity of the approach in generating different feeding motions to adapt to user’s preferences,
automatically extracting the relevant task parameters. The importance of the nature of the demonstrations is also
assessed, and two training strategies are compared. © Springer International Publishing AG 2016.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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