More Like this

1. ASAP-CORPS: A Semi-Autonomous Platform for COntact-Rich Precision Surgery

   https://doi.org/10.1093/milmed/usad175  

   Balakuntala, Mythra V. ; Gonzalez, Glebys T. ; Wachs, Juan P. ; Voyles, Richard M. ( November 2023 , Military Medicine)

   Remote military operations require rapid response times for effective relief and critical care. Yet, the military theater is under austere conditions, so communication links are unreliable and subject to physical and virtual attacks and degradation at unpredictable times. Immediate medical care at these austere locations requires semi-autonomous teleoperated systems, which enable the completion of medical procedures even under interrupted networks while isolating the medics from the dangers of the battlefield. However, to achieve autonomy for complex surgical and critical care procedures, robots require extensive programming or massive libraries of surgical skill demonstrations to learn effective policies using machine learning algorithms. Although such datasets are achievable for simple tasks, providing a large number of demonstrations for surgical maneuvers is not practical. This article presents a method for learning from demonstration, combining knowledge from demonstrations to eliminate reward shaping in reinforcement learning (RL). In addition to reducing the data required for training, the self-supervised nature of RL, in conjunction with expert knowledge-driven rewards, produces more generalizable policies tolerant to dynamic environment changes. A multimodal representation for interaction enables learning complex contact-rich surgical maneuvers. The effectiveness of the approach is shown using the cricothyroidotomy task, as it is a standard procedure seen in critical care to open the airway. In addition, we also provide a method for segmenting the teleoperator’s demonstration into subtasks and classifying the subtasks using sequence modeling.

   A database of demonstrations for the cricothyroidotomy task was collected, comprising six fundamental maneuvers referred to as surgemes. The dataset was collected by teleoperating a collaborative robotic platform—SuperBaxter, with modified surgical grippers. Then, two learning models are developed for processing the dataset—one for automatic segmentation of the task demonstrations into a sequence of surgemes and the second for classifying each segment into labeled surgemes. Finally, a multimodal off-policy RL with rewards learned from demonstrations was developed to learn the surgeme execution from these demonstrations.

   The task segmentation model has an accuracy of 98.2%. The surgeme classification model using the proposed interaction features achieved a classification accuracy of 96.25% averaged across all surgemes compared to 87.08% without these features and 85.4% using a support vector machine classifier. Finally, the robot execution achieved a task success rate of 93.5% compared to baselines of behavioral cloning (78.3%) and a twin-delayed deep deterministic policy gradient with shaped rewards (82.6%).

   Results indicate that the proposed interaction features for the segmentation and classification of surgical tasks improve classification accuracy. The proposed method for learning surgemes from demonstrations exceeds popular methods for skill learning. The effectiveness of the proposed approach demonstrates the potential for future remote telemedicine on battlefields.

    

   more » « less
2. HERD: Continuous Human-to-Robot Evolution for Learning from Human Demonstration

   Xingyu Liu ; Deepak Pathak ; Kris M. Kitani ( October 2022 , Conference on Robot Learning)

   The ability to learn from human demonstration endows robots with the ability to automate various tasks. However, directly learning from human demonstration is challenging since the structure of the human hand can be very different from the desired robot gripper. In this work, we show that manipulation skills can be transferred from a human to a robot through the use of micro-evolutionary reinforcement learning, where a five-finger human dexterous hand robot gradually evolves into a commercial two-finger-gripper robot, while repeated interacting in a physics simulator to continuously update the policy that is first learned from human demonstration. To deal with the high dimensions of robot parameters, we propose an algorithm for multi-dimensional evolution path searching that allows joint optimization of both the robot evolution path and the policy. Through experiments on human object manipulation datasets, we show that our framework can efficiently transfer the expert human agent policy trained from human demonstrations in diverse modalities to a target commercial robot. 

   more » « less
3. Composable Interaction Primitives: A Structured Policy Class for Efficiently Learning Sustained-Contact Manipulation Skills

   Abbatematteo, Ben ; Rosen, Eric ; Thompson, Skye ; Akbulut, Tuluhan ; Rammohan, Sreehari ; Konidaris, George ( May 2024 , Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation)

   We propose a new policy class, Composable Interaction Primitives (CIPs), specialized for learning sustained-contact manipulation skills like opening a drawer, pulling a lever, turning a wheel, or shifting gears. CIPs have two primary design goals: to minimize what must be learned by exploiting structure present in the world and the robot, and to support sequential composition by construction, so that learned skills can be used by a task-level planner. Using an ablation experiment in four simulated manipulation tasks, we show that the structure included in CIPs substantially improves the efficiency of motor skill learning. We then show that CIPs can be used for plan execution in a zero-shot fashion by sequencing learned skills.We validate our approach on real robot hardware by learning and sequencing two manipulation skills. 

   more » « less
4. Ergodic LfD: Learning from what to do and what not to do

   Aleksandra Kalinowska, Ahalya Prabhakar ( January 2021 , IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation)

   null (Ed.)

   With growing access to versatile robotics, it is beneficial for end users to be able to teach robots tasks without needing to code a control policy. One possibility is to teach the robot through successful task executions. However, near-optimal demonstrations of a task can be difficult to provide and even successful demonstrations can fail to capture task aspects key to robust skill replication. Here, we propose a learning from demonstration (LfD) approach that enables learning of robust task definitions without the need for near-optimal demonstrations. We present a novel algorithmic framework for learning task specifications based on the ergodic metric—a measure of information content in motion. Moreover, we make use of negative demonstrations— demonstrations of what not to do—and show that they can help compensate for imperfect demonstrations, reduce the number of demonstrations needed, and highlight crucial task elements improving robot performance. In a proof-of-concept example of cart-pole inversion, we show that negative demonstrations alone can be sufficient to successfully learn and recreate a skill. Through a human subject study with 24 participants, we show that consistently more information about a task can be captured from combined positive and negative (posneg) demonstrations than from the same amount of just positive demonstrations. Finally, we demonstrate our learning approach on simulated tasks of target reaching and table cleaning with a 7-DoF Franka arm. Our results point towards a future with robust, data efficient LfD for novice users. 

   more » « less
5. DiffSkill: Skill Abstraction from Differentiable Physics for Deformable Object Manipulations with Tools

   Lin, Xingyu ; Huang, Zhiao ; Li, Yunzhu ; Tenenbaum, Joshua B. ; Held, David ; Gan, Chuang ( January 2022 , International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR))

   We consider the problem of sequential robotic manipulation of deformable objects using tools. Previous works have shown that differentiable physics simulators provide gradients to the environment state and help trajectory optimization to converge orders of magnitude faster than model-free reinforcement learning algorithms for deformable object manipulation. However, such gradient-based trajectory optimization typically requires access to the full simulator states and can only solve short-horizon, single-skill tasks due to local optima. In this work, we propose a novel framework, named DiffSkill, that uses a differentiable physics simulator for skill abstraction to solve long-horizon deformable object manipulation tasks from sensory observations. In particular, we first obtain short-horizon skills using individual tools from a gradient-based optimizer, using the full state information in a differentiable simulator; we then learn a neural skill abstractor from the demonstration trajectories which takes RGBD images as input. Finally, we plan over the skills by finding the intermediate goals and then solve long-horizon tasks. We show the advantages of our method in a new set of sequential deformable object manipulation tasks compared to previous reinforcement learning algorithms and compared to the trajectory optimizer. 

   more » « less