26,973 research outputs found
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
Transformer Networks for Trajectory Forecasting
Most recent successes on forecasting the people motion are based on LSTM
models and all most recent progress has been achieved by modelling the social
interaction among people and the people interaction with the scene. We question
the use of the LSTM models and propose the novel use of Transformer Networks
for trajectory forecasting. This is a fundamental switch from the sequential
step-by-step processing of LSTMs to the only-attention-based memory mechanisms
of Transformers. In particular, we consider both the original Transformer
Network (TF) and the larger Bidirectional Transformer (BERT), state-of-the-art
on all natural language processing tasks. Our proposed Transformers predict the
trajectories of the individual people in the scene. These are "simple" model
because each person is modelled separately without any complex human-human nor
scene interaction terms. In particular, the TF model without bells and whistles
yields the best score on the largest and most challenging trajectory
forecasting benchmark of TrajNet. Additionally, its extension which predicts
multiple plausible future trajectories performs on par with more engineered
techniques on the 5 datasets of ETH + UCY. Finally, we show that Transformers
may deal with missing observations, as it may be the case with real sensor
data. Code is available at https://github.com/FGiuliari/Trajectory-Transformer.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figure
Learning by observation through system identification
In our previous works, we present a new method
to program mobile robots —“code identification by
demonstration”— based on algorithmically transferring
human behaviours to robot control code using
transparent mathematical functions. Our approach
has three stages: i) first extracting the trajectory of the
desired behaviour by observing the human, ii) making
the robot follow the human trajectory blindly to
log the robot’s own perception perceived along that
trajectory, and finally iii) linking the robot’s perception
to the desired behaviour to obtain a generalised,
sensor-based model.
So far we used an external, camera based motion
tracking system to log the trajectory of the human
demonstrator during his initial demonstration of the
desired motion. Because such tracking systems are
complicated to set up and expensive, we propose an alternative method to obtain trajectory information, using the robot’s own sensor perception.
In this method, we train a mathematical polynomial using the NARMAX system identification methodology which maps the position of the “red jacket” worn by the demonstrator in the image captured by the robot’s camera, to the relative position of the demonstrator in the real world according to the robot.
We demonstrate the viability of this approach by teaching a Scitos G5 mobile robot to achieve door traversal behaviour
CAR-Net: Clairvoyant Attentive Recurrent Network
We present an interpretable framework for path prediction that leverages
dependencies between agents' behaviors and their spatial navigation
environment. We exploit two sources of information: the past motion trajectory
of the agent of interest and a wide top-view image of the navigation scene. We
propose a Clairvoyant Attentive Recurrent Network (CAR-Net) that learns where
to look in a large image of the scene when solving the path prediction task.
Our method can attend to any area, or combination of areas, within the raw
image (e.g., road intersections) when predicting the trajectory of the agent.
This allows us to visualize fine-grained semantic elements of navigation scenes
that influence the prediction of trajectories. To study the impact of space on
agents' trajectories, we build a new dataset made of top-view images of
hundreds of scenes (Formula One racing tracks) where agents' behaviors are
heavily influenced by known areas in the images (e.g., upcoming turns). CAR-Net
successfully attends to these salient regions. Additionally, CAR-Net reaches
state-of-the-art accuracy on the standard trajectory forecasting benchmark,
Stanford Drone Dataset (SDD). Finally, we show CAR-Net's ability to generalize
to unseen scenes.Comment: The 2nd and 3rd authors contributed equall
Robot training using system identification
This paper focuses on developing a formal, theory-based design methodology to generate transparent robot control programs using mathematical functions. The research finds its theoretical roots in robot training and system identification techniques such as Armax (Auto-Regressive Moving Average models with eXogenous inputs) and Narmax (Non-linear Armax). These techniques produce linear and non-linear polynomial functions that model the relationship between a robot’s sensor perception and motor response.
The main benefits of the proposed design methodology, compared to the traditional robot programming techniques are: (i) It is a fast and efficient way of generating robot control code, (ii) The generated robot control programs are transparent mathematical functions that can be used to form hypotheses and theoretical analyses of robot behaviour, and (iii) It requires very little explicit knowledge of robot programming where end-users/programmers who do not have any specialised robot programming skills can nevertheless generate task-achieving sensor-motor couplings.
The nature of this research is concerned with obtaining sensor-motor couplings, be it through human demonstration via the robot, direct human demonstration, or other means. The viability of our methodology has been demonstrated by teaching various mobile robots different sensor-motor tasks such as wall following, corridor passing, door traversal and route learning
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