Task-adaptive robot learning from demonstration with gaussian process models under replication

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a paradigm that allows robots to learn complex manipulation tasks that can not be easily scripted, but can be demonstrated by a human teacher. One of the challenges of LfD is to enable robots to acquire skills that can be adapted to different scenarios. In this l...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Authors: Arduengo, Miguel, Colomé, Adrià, Borràs, Julia, Sentis, Luis, Torras, Carme
Format: article
Status:Versión aceptada para publicación
Publication Date:2021
Country:España
Institution:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repository:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/261271
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/261271
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Learning from demonstration
Probability and statistical methods
Human-Centered robotics
Description
Summary:Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a paradigm that allows robots to learn complex manipulation tasks that can not be easily scripted, but can be demonstrated by a human teacher. One of the challenges of LfD is to enable robots to acquire skills that can be adapted to different scenarios. In this letter, we propose to achieve this by exploiting the variations in the demonstrations to retrieve an adaptive and robust policy, using Gaussian Process (GP) models. Adaptability is enhanced by incorporating task parameters into the model, which encode different specifications within the same task. With our formulation, these parameters can be either real, integer, or categorical. Furthermore, we propose a GP design that exploits the structure of replications, i.e., repeated demonstrations with identical conditions within data. Our method significantly reduces the computational cost of model fitting in complex tasks, where replications are essential to obtain a robust model. We illustrate our approach through several experiments on a handwritten letter demonstration dataset.