Robot skills systems are meant to reduce robot setup time for new
manufacturing tasks. Yet, for dexterous, contact-rich tasks, it is often
difficult to find the right skill parameters. One strategy is to learn these
parameters by allowing the robot system to learn directly on the task. For a
learning problem, a robot operator can typically specify the type and range of
values of the parameters. Nevertheless, given their prior experience, robot
operators should be able to help the learning process further by providing
educated guesses about where in the parameter space potential optimal solutions
could be found. Interestingly, such prior knowledge is not exploited in current
robot learning frameworks. We introduce an approach that combines user priors
and Bayesian optimization to allow fast optimization of robot industrial tasks
at robot deployment time. We evaluate our method on three tasks that are
learned in simulation as well as on two tasks that are learned directly on a
real robot system. Additionally, we transfer knowledge from the corresponding
simulation tasks by automatically constructing priors from well-performing
configurations for learning on the real system. To handle potentially
contradicting task objectives, the tasks are modeled as multi-objective
problems. Our results show that operator priors, both user-specified and
transferred, vastly accelerate the discovery of rich Pareto fronts, and
typically produce final performance far superior to proposed baselines.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, accepted at 2022 IEEE International Conference on
Automation Science and Engineering (CASE
