92,533 research outputs found
Learning Contact-Rich Manipulation Skills with Guided Policy Search
Autonomous learning of object manipulation skills can enable robots to
acquire rich behavioral repertoires that scale to the variety of objects found
in the real world. However, current motion skill learning methods typically
restrict the behavior to a compact, low-dimensional representation, limiting
its expressiveness and generality. In this paper, we extend a recently
developed policy search method \cite{la-lnnpg-14} and use it to learn a range
of dynamic manipulation behaviors with highly general policy representations,
without using known models or example demonstrations. Our approach learns a set
of trajectories for the desired motion skill by using iteratively refitted
time-varying linear models, and then unifies these trajectories into a single
control policy that can generalize to new situations. To enable this method to
run on a real robot, we introduce several improvements that reduce the sample
count and automate parameter selection. We show that our method can acquire
fast, fluent behaviors after only minutes of interaction time, and can learn
robust controllers for complex tasks, including putting together a toy
airplane, stacking tight-fitting lego blocks, placing wooden rings onto
tight-fitting pegs, inserting a shoe tree into a shoe, and screwing bottle caps
onto bottles
Neural Task Programming: Learning to Generalize Across Hierarchical Tasks
In this work, we propose a novel robot learning framework called Neural Task
Programming (NTP), which bridges the idea of few-shot learning from
demonstration and neural program induction. NTP takes as input a task
specification (e.g., video demonstration of a task) and recursively decomposes
it into finer sub-task specifications. These specifications are fed to a
hierarchical neural program, where bottom-level programs are callable
subroutines that interact with the environment. We validate our method in three
robot manipulation tasks. NTP achieves strong generalization across sequential
tasks that exhibit hierarchal and compositional structures. The experimental
results show that NTP learns to generalize well to- wards unseen tasks with
increasing lengths, variable topologies, and changing objectives.Comment: 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
Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People
Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has renewed interest in
building systems that learn and think like people. Many advances have come from
using deep neural networks trained end-to-end in tasks such as object
recognition, video games, and board games, achieving performance that equals or
even beats humans in some respects. Despite their biological inspiration and
performance achievements, these systems differ from human intelligence in
crucial ways. We review progress in cognitive science suggesting that truly
human-like learning and thinking machines will have to reach beyond current
engineering trends in both what they learn, and how they learn it.
Specifically, we argue that these machines should (a) build causal models of
the world that support explanation and understanding, rather than merely
solving pattern recognition problems; (b) ground learning in intuitive theories
of physics and psychology, to support and enrich the knowledge that is learned;
and (c) harness compositionality and learning-to-learn to rapidly acquire and
generalize knowledge to new tasks and situations. We suggest concrete
challenges and promising routes towards these goals that can combine the
strengths of recent neural network advances with more structured cognitive
models.Comment: In press at Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Open call for commentary
proposals (until Nov. 22, 2016).
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/information/calls-for-commentary/open-calls-for-commentar
Learning Independent Causal Mechanisms
Statistical learning relies upon data sampled from a distribution, and we
usually do not care what actually generated it in the first place. From the
point of view of causal modeling, the structure of each distribution is induced
by physical mechanisms that give rise to dependences between observables.
Mechanisms, however, can be meaningful autonomous modules of generative models
that make sense beyond a particular entailed data distribution, lending
themselves to transfer between problems. We develop an algorithm to recover a
set of independent (inverse) mechanisms from a set of transformed data points.
The approach is unsupervised and based on a set of experts that compete for
data generated by the mechanisms, driving specialization. We analyze the
proposed method in a series of experiments on image data. Each expert learns to
map a subset of the transformed data back to a reference distribution. The
learned mechanisms generalize to novel domains. We discuss implications for
transfer learning and links to recent trends in generative modeling.Comment: ICML 201
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