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Many robots move through the world by composing locomotion primitives like steps and turns. To do so well, robots need not have primitives that make intuitive sense to humans. This becomes of paramount importance when robots are damaged and no longer move as designed. Here we propose a goal function we call “coverage”, that represents the usefulness of a library of locomotion primitives in a manner agnostic to the particulars of the primitives themselves. We demonstrate the ability to optimize coverage on both simulated and physical robots, and show that coverage can be rapidly recovered after injury. This suggests that by optimizing for coverage, robots can sustain their ability to navigate through the world even in the face of significant mechanical failures. The benefits of this approach are enhanced by sample-efficient, data-driven approaches to system identification that can rapidly inform the optimization of primitives. We found that the number of degrees of freedom improved the rate of recovery of our simulated robots, a rare result in the fields of gait optimization and reinforcement learning. We showed that a robot with limbs made of tree branches (for which no CAD model or first principles model was available) is able to quickly find an effective high-coverage library of motion primitives. The optimized primitives are entirely non-obvious to a human observer, and thus are unlikely to be attainable through manual tuning.
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A Framework for Learning and Reusing Robotic Skills
In this paper, we present our work in progress towards creating a library of motion primitives. This library facilitates easier and more intuitive learning and reusing of robotic skills. Users can teach robots complex skills through Learning from Demonstration, which is automatically segmented into primitives and stored in clusters of similar skills. We propose a novel multimodal segmentation method as well as a novel trajectory clustering method. Then, when needed for reuse, we transform primitives into new environments using trajectory editing. We present simulated results for our framework with demonstrations taken on real-world robots.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2237463
- PAR ID:
- 10583156
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 801-804
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- New York, NY, USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
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- The DOI is not currently available.
