Learning manipulation actions from a few demonstrations

Abstract

To efficiently plan complex manipulation tasks, robots need to reason on a high level. Symbolic planning, however, requires knowledge about the preconditions and effects of the individual actions. In this work, we present a practical approach to learn manipulation skills, including preconditions and effects, based on teacher demonstrations. We believe that requiring only a small number of demonstrations is essential for robots operating in the real world. Therefore, our main focus and contribution is the ability to infer the preconditions and effects of actions based on a small number of demonstrations. Our system furthermore expresses the acquired manipulation actions as planning operators and is therefore able to use symbolic planners to solve new tasks. We implemented our approach on a PR2 robot and present real world manipulation experiments that illustrate that our system allows non-experts to transfer knowledge to robots.