98,161 research outputs found
Movement Primitive Learning and Generalization : Using Mixture Density Networks
Representing robot skills as movement primitives (MPs) that can be learned from human demonstration and adapted to new tasks and situations is a promising approach toward intuitive robot programming. To allow such adaptation, mapping between task parameters and MP parameters is needed, and different approaches have been proposed in the literature to learn such mapping. In human demonstrations, however, multiple modes and models exist, and these should be taken into account when learning these mappings and generalized MP representations
Towards Orientation Learning and Adaptation in Cartesian Space
As a promising branch of robotics, imitation learning emerges as an important way to transfer human skills to robots, where human demonstrations represented in Cartesian or joint spaces are utilized to estimate task/skill models that can be subsequently generalized to new situations. While learning Cartesian positions suffices for many applications, the end-effector orientation is required in many others. Despite recent advances in learning orientations from demonstrations, several crucial issues have not been adequately addressed yet. For instance, how can demonstrated orientations be adapted to pass through arbitrary desired points that comprise orientations and angular velocities? In this article, we propose an approach that is capable of learning multiple orientation trajectories and adapting learned orientation skills to new situations (e.g., via-points and end-points), where both orientation and angular velocity are considered. Specifically, we introduce a kernelized treatment to alleviate explicit basis functions when learning orientations, which allows for learning orientation trajectories associated with high-dimensional inputs. In addition, we extend our approach to the learning of quaternions with angular acceleration or jerk constraints, which allows for generating smoother orientation profiles for robots. Several examples including experiments with real 7-DoF robot arms are provided to verify the effectiveness of our method
Exploration of muscle fatigue effects in bioinspired robot learning from sEMG signals
© 2018 Ning Wang et al. To investigate the effects of muscle fatigue on bioinspired robot learning quality in teaching by demonstration (TbD) tasks, in this work, we propose to first identify the emerging muscle fatigue phenomenon of the human demonstrator by analyzing his/her surface Electromyography (sEMG) recordings and then guide the robot learning curve with this knowledge in mind. The time-varying amplitude and frequency sequences determining the subband sEMG signals have been estimated and their dominant values over short time intervals have been explored as fatigue-indicating features. These features are found carrying muscle fatigue cues of the human demonstrator in the course of robot manipulation. In robot learning tasks requiring multiple demonstrations, the fatiguing status of human demonstrator can be acquired by tracking the changes of the proposed features over time. In order to model data from multiple demonstrations, Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) have been employed. According to the identified muscle fatigue factor, a weight has been assigned to each of the demonstration trials in training stage, which is therefore termed as weighted GMMs (W-GMMs) algorithm. Six groups of data with various fatiguing status, as well as their corresponding weights, are taken as input data to get the adapted W-GMMs parameters. After that, Gaussian mixture regression (GMR) algorithm has been applied to regenerate the movement trajectory for the robot. TbD experiments on Baxter robot with 30 human demonstration trials show that the robot can successfully accomplish the taught task with a generated trajectory much closer to that of the desirable condition where little fatigue exists
Robots that Learn and Plan — Unifying Robot Learning and Motion Planning for Generalized Task Execution
Robots have the potential to assist people with a variety of everyday tasks, but to achieve that potential robots require software capable of planning and executing motions in cluttered environments. To address this, over the past few decades, roboticists have developed numerous methods for planning motions to avoid obstacles with increasingly stronger guarantees, from probabilistic completeness to asymptotic optimality. Some of these methods have even considered the types of constraints that must be satisfied to perform useful tasks, but these constraints must generally be manually specified. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of methods for automatic learning of tasks from human-provided demonstrations. Unfortunately, these two fields, task learning and motion planning, have evolved largely separate from one another, and the learned models are often not usable by motion planners.
In this thesis, we aim to bridge the gap between robot task learning and motion planning by employing a learned task model that can subsequently be leveraged by an asymptotically-optimal motion planner to autonomously execute the task. First, we show that application of a motion planner enables task performance while avoiding novel obstacles and extend this to dynamic environments by replanning at reactive rates. Second, we generalize the method to accommodate time-invariant model parameters, allowing more information to be gleaned from the demonstrations. Third, we describe a more principled approach to temporal registration for such learning methods that mirrors the ultimate integration with a motion planner and often reduces the number of demonstrations required.
Finally, we extend this framework to the domain of mobile manipulation. We empirically evaluate each of these contributions on multiple household tasks using the Aldebaran Nao, Rethink Robotics Baxter, and Fetch mobile manipulator robots to show that these approaches improve task execution success rates and reduce the amount of human-provided information required.Doctor of Philosoph
Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video
We propose a self-supervised approach for learning representations and
robotic behaviors entirely from unlabeled videos recorded from multiple
viewpoints, and study how this representation can be used in two robotic
imitation settings: imitating object interactions from videos of humans, and
imitating human poses. Imitation of human behavior requires a
viewpoint-invariant representation that captures the relationships between
end-effectors (hands or robot grippers) and the environment, object attributes,
and body pose. We train our representations using a metric learning loss, where
multiple simultaneous viewpoints of the same observation are attracted in the
embedding space, while being repelled from temporal neighbors which are often
visually similar but functionally different. In other words, the model
simultaneously learns to recognize what is common between different-looking
images, and what is different between similar-looking images. This signal
causes our model to discover attributes that do not change across viewpoint,
but do change across time, while ignoring nuisance variables such as
occlusions, motion blur, lighting and background. We demonstrate that this
representation can be used by a robot to directly mimic human poses without an
explicit correspondence, and that it can be used as a reward function within a
reinforcement learning algorithm. While representations are learned from an
unlabeled collection of task-related videos, robot behaviors such as pouring
are learned by watching a single 3rd-person demonstration by a human. Reward
functions obtained by following the human demonstrations under the learned
representation enable efficient reinforcement learning that is practical for
real-world robotic systems. Video results, open-source code and dataset are
available at https://sermanet.github.io/imitat
Efficiently Combining Human Demonstrations and Interventions for Safe Training of Autonomous Systems in Real-Time
This paper investigates how to utilize different forms of human interaction
to safely train autonomous systems in real-time by learning from both human
demonstrations and interventions. We implement two components of the
Cycle-of-Learning for Autonomous Systems, which is our framework for combining
multiple modalities of human interaction. The current effort employs human
demonstrations to teach a desired behavior via imitation learning, then
leverages intervention data to correct for undesired behaviors produced by the
imitation learner to teach novel tasks to an autonomous agent safely, after
only minutes of training. We demonstrate this method in an autonomous perching
task using a quadrotor with continuous roll, pitch, yaw, and throttle commands
and imagery captured from a downward-facing camera in a high-fidelity simulated
environment. Our method improves task completion performance for the same
amount of human interaction when compared to learning from demonstrations
alone, while also requiring on average 32% less data to achieve that
performance. This provides evidence that combining multiple modes of human
interaction can increase both the training speed and overall performance of
policies for autonomous systems.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure
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