Interactive robot learning of visuospatial skills

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel interactive robot learning approach for acquiring visuospatial skills. It allows a robot to acquire new capabilities by observing a demonstration while interacting with a human caregiver. Most existing learning from demonstration approaches focus on the trajectories, whereas in our approach the focus is placed on achieving a desired goal configuration of objects relative to one another. Our approach is based on visual perception which captures the object's context for each demonstrated action. The context embodies implicitly the visuospatial representation including the relative positioning of the object with respect to multiple other objects simultaneously. The proposed approach is capable of learning and generalizing different skills such as object reconfiguration, classification, and turn-taking interaction. The robot learns to achieve the goal from a single demonstration while requiring minimum a priori knowledge about the environment. We illustrate the capabilities of our approach using four real world experiments with a Barrett WAM robot.