Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Morphable Models for Representation of complex movements for Imitation Learning

Abstract

Imitation learning is a promising technique for teaching robots complex movement sequences. One key problem in this area is the transfer of perceived movement characteristics from perception to action. For the solution of this problem, representations are required that are suitable for the analysis and the synthesis of complex action sequences. We describe the method of Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Morphable Models that allows an automatic segmentation of movements sequences into movement primitives, and a modeling of these primitives by morphing between a set of prototypical trajectories. We use HSTMMs in an imitation learning task for human writing movements. The models are learned from recorded trajectories and transferred to a human-like robot arm. Due to the generalization properties of our representation, the arm is capable of synthesizing new writing movements with a few learning examples. 1