Learning a robot motor skill from scratch is impractically slow; so much so that in practice, learning must typically be bootstrapped using human demonstration. However, relying on human demonstration necessarily degrades the autonomy of robots that must learn a wide variety of skills over their operational lifetimes. We propose using kinematic motion planning as a completely autonomous, sample efficient way to bootstrap motor skill learning for object manipulation. We demonstrate the use of motion planners to bootstrap motor skills in two complex object manipulation scenarios with different policy representations: opening a drawer with a dynamic movement primitive representation, and closingmore »
Learning compositional models of robot skills for task and motion planning
The objective of this work is to augment the basic abilities of a robot by learning to use sensorimotor primitives to solve complex long-horizon manipulation problems. This requires flexible generative planning that can combine primitive abilities in novel combinations and, thus, generalize across a wide variety of problems. In order to plan with primitive actions, we must have models of the actions: under what circumstances will executing this primitive successfully achieve some particular effect in the world? We use, and develop novel improvements to, state-of-the-art methods for active learning and sampling. We use Gaussian process methods for learning the constraints on skill effectiveness from small numbers of expensive-to-collect training examples. In addition, we develop efficient adaptive sampling methods for generating a comprehensive and diverse sequence of continuous candidate control parameter values (such as pouring waypoints for a cup) during planning. These values become end-effector goals for traditional motion planners that then solve for a full robot motion that performs the skill. By using learning and planning methods in conjunction, we take advantage of the strengths of each and plan for a wide variety of complex dynamic manipulation tasks. We demonstrate our approach in an integrated system, combining traditional robotics primitives more »
- Award ID(s):
- 1723381
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10282207
- Journal Name:
- The International Journal of Robotics Research
- Volume:
- 40
- Issue:
- 6-7
- Page Range or eLocation-ID:
- 866 to 894
- ISSN:
- 0278-3649
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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