Programming groups of local models from human demonstration to create a model for robotic assembly

Abstract

A model of contact-state transitions is useful for motion planning, robot control, and sensing. Modeling the entire set of contact-state transitions every object, however, is very troublesome. To overcome the problem, we have developed a method for programming the model from human demonstration using a model of local contact-state transitions between a vertex pair (local model). Our method consists of three parts: (1) allocating the local model to vertex pairs where contact-state transitions will occur, (2) gathering them into groups according to an assembly sequence, and (3) unifying different groups resulting from different demonstrations of the same task. The allocation and grouping are done by simply showing a robotic system an assembly sequence through demonstration. The unification is done by comparing local models between different groups. We applied the method to two object-insertion tasks and did two kinds of experiments: (1) programming groups of local models from demonstration and (2) performing the demonstrated task by a robot using the programmed groups. The results showed the effectiveness in programming from demonstration and in the modeling problem.