46,965 research outputs found
Towards learning hierarchical skills for multi-phase manipulation tasks
Most manipulation tasks can be decomposed into
a sequence of phases, where the robot’s actions have different
effects in each phase. The robot can perform actions to
transition between phases and, thus, alter the effects of its
actions, e.g. grasp an object in order to then lift it. The robot
can thus reach a phase that affords the desired manipulation.
In this paper, we present an approach for exploiting the
phase structure of tasks in order to learn manipulation skills
more efficiently. Starting with human demonstrations, the robot
learns a probabilistic model of the phases and the phase
transitions. The robot then employs model-based reinforcement
learning to create a library of motor primitives for transitioning
between phases. The learned motor primitives generalize to new
situations and tasks. Given this library, the robot uses a value
function approach to learn a high-level policy for sequencing
the motor primitives. The proposed method was successfully
evaluated on a real robot performing a bimanual grasping task
Robot Introspection with Bayesian Nonparametric Vector Autoregressive Hidden Markov Models
Robot introspection, as opposed to anomaly detection typical in process
monitoring, helps a robot understand what it is doing at all times. A robot
should be able to identify its actions not only when failure or novelty occurs,
but also as it executes any number of sub-tasks. As robots continue their quest
of functioning in unstructured environments, it is imperative they understand
what is it that they are actually doing to render them more robust. This work
investigates the modeling ability of Bayesian nonparametric techniques on
Markov Switching Process to learn complex dynamics typical in robot contact
tasks. We study whether the Markov switching process, together with Bayesian
priors can outperform the modeling ability of its counterparts: an HMM with
Bayesian priors and without. The work was tested in a snap assembly task
characterized by high elastic forces. The task consists of an insertion subtask
with very complex dynamics. Our approach showed a stronger ability to
generalize and was able to better model the subtask with complex dynamics in a
computationally efficient way. The modeling technique is also used to learn a
growing library of robot skills, one that when integrated with low-level
control allows for robot online decision making.Comment: final version submitted to humanoids 201
Multi-Modal Imitation Learning from Unstructured Demonstrations using Generative Adversarial Nets
Imitation learning has traditionally been applied to learn a single task from
demonstrations thereof. The requirement of structured and isolated
demonstrations limits the scalability of imitation learning approaches as they
are difficult to apply to real-world scenarios, where robots have to be able to
execute a multitude of tasks. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal imitation
learning framework that is able to segment and imitate skills from unlabelled
and unstructured demonstrations by learning skill segmentation and imitation
learning jointly. The extensive simulation results indicate that our method can
efficiently separate the demonstrations into individual skills and learn to
imitate them using a single multi-modal policy. The video of our experiments is
available at http://sites.google.com/view/nips17intentionganComment: Paper accepted to NIPS 201
Online Robot Introspection via Wrench-based Action Grammars
Robotic failure is all too common in unstructured robot tasks. Despite
well-designed controllers, robots often fail due to unexpected events. How do
robots measure unexpected events? Many do not. Most robots are driven by the
sense-plan act paradigm, however more recently robots are undergoing a
sense-plan-act-verify paradigm. In this work, we present a principled
methodology to bootstrap online robot introspection for contact tasks. In
effect, we are trying to enable the robot to answer the question: what did I
do? Is my behavior as expected or not? To this end, we analyze noisy wrench
data and postulate that the latter inherently contains patterns that can be
effectively represented by a vocabulary. The vocabulary is generated by
segmenting and encoding the data. When the wrench information represents a
sequence of sub-tasks, we can think of the vocabulary forming a sentence (set
of words with grammar rules) for a given sub-task; allowing the latter to be
uniquely represented. The grammar, which can also include unexpected events,
was classified in offline and online scenarios as well as for simulated and
real robot experiments. Multiclass Support Vector Machines (SVMs) were used
offline, while online probabilistic SVMs were are used to give temporal
confidence to the introspection result. The contribution of our work is the
presentation of a generalizable online semantic scheme that enables a robot to
understand its high-level state whether nominal or abnormal. It is shown to
work in offline and online scenarios for a particularly challenging contact
task: snap assemblies. We perform the snap assembly in one-arm simulated and
real one-arm experiments and a simulated two-arm experiment. This verification
mechanism can be used by high-level planners or reasoning systems to enable
intelligent failure recovery or determine the next most optima manipulation
skill to be used.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1609.0494
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