'...to perform their tasks safely and efficiently, robots must show the same degree of precisions in their skills as humans do. ...'

Partners involved

RA leader : EPFL

partners involved : EPFL, UH, UniKarl, LAAS, UvA

RA objectives

In order to perform their tasks safely and efficiently, the robots must show the same degree of precision in their skills as humans do. To provide robots with sophisticated motor skills for flexible and precise motion has proven to be a very difficult task, requiring important low-level programming (with high cost) for finely
tuning the motor parameters and for re-calibration of sensor processing.

An alternative is to provide the robot with learning or adaptive capabilities, which can be used for on-line optimisation of predefined motor control parameters. Particularly challenging is the problem of how to teach a robot new motor skills, without going through reprogramming, but simply through demonstration. This allows the robot to be programmed and interacted with, merely by human demonstration, a much more natural and simple means of human-machine interface; and it makes the robot flexible with respect to the tasks it can be taught and, thus, facilitates the end-use of robotic systems.

This activity addresses the problem of how to teach a robot new motor skills and complex tasks through human demonstration. The learning algorithms to be developed in this activity will be general and address fundamental questions of imitation learning, applied to manipulation tasks. The related areas of research are:

Skill and Task Learning
Programming through Demonstration
Visio-Motor Learning
Human Robot Interactions
Social and Observational Learning

Work conducted in RA4 is related to Key Experiment 3 ('Learning Skills and Tasks') but also related to the other Research Activities.

Related project publications

Below are only listed some of the RA4-related publications, please see the Publications page for more.

Bart Jansen, Towards goal-directed imitation, Submitted to ICRA05, April 18-22 2005, Barcelona, Spain.

Sylvain Calinon, Florent Guenter, Aude Billard, Goal-Directed Imitation in a Humanoid Robot, Submitted to ICRA 05, April 18-22 2005, Barcelona, Spain.

Aris Alissandrakis, Chrystopher Nehaniv, Kerstin Dautenhahn and Joe Saunders, An Approach for Programming Robots by Demonstration to Manipulate Objects : considerations on Metrics to Achieve Corresponding Effects, Submitted to ICRA 05, April 18-22 2005, Barcelona, Spain.

Jansen, Bart, ten Thij, Tom, Belpaeme, Tony, De Vylder, Bart and de Boer, Bart (2004) Imitation in embodied agents results in self-organization of behavior. In Schaal, S., Ijspeert, A.J., Billard, A., Vijayakumar, S., Hallam, J. and Meyer, J.-A. (eds.) From animals to animats 8. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 455-466

Relevant Links

Workshop organised during ICRA2005 on 'The Social Mechanisms of Robot Programming by Demonstration' organised by two COGNIRON partners (EPFL and UniKarl).

'...to perform their tasks safely and efficiently, robots must show the same degree of precisions in their skills as humans do. ...'

Partners involved

RA leader : EPFL

partners involved : EPFL, UH, UniKarl, LAAS, UvA

RA objectives

In order to perform their tasks safely and efficiently, the robots must show the same degree of precision in their skills as humans do. To provide robots with sophisticated motor skills for flexible and precise motion has proven to be a very difficult task, requiring important low-level programming (with high cost) for finely
tuning the motor parameters and for re-calibration of sensor processing.

An alternative is to provide the robot with learning or adaptive capabilities, which can be used for on-line optimisation of predefined motor control parameters. Particularly challenging is the problem of how to teach a robot new motor skills, without going through reprogramming, but simply through demonstration. This allows the robot to be programmed and interacted with, merely by human demonstration, a much more natural and simple means of human-machine interface; and it makes the robot flexible with respect to the tasks it can be taught and, thus, facilitates the end-use of robotic systems.

This activity addresses the problem of how to teach a robot new motor skills and complex tasks through human demonstration. The learning algorithms to be developed in this activity will be general and address fundamental questions of imitation learning, applied to manipulation tasks. The related areas of research are:

Skill and Task Learning
Programming through Demonstration
Visio-Motor Learning
Human Robot Interactions
Social and Observational Learning

Work conducted in RA4 is related to Key Experiment 3 ('Learning Skills and Tasks') but also related to the other Research Activities.

Related project publications

Bart Jansen, Towards goal-directed imitation, Submitted to ICRA05, April 18-22 2005, Barcelona, Spain.

Sylvain Calinon, Florent Guenter, Aude Billard, Goal-Directed Imitation in a Humanoid Robot, Submitted to ICRA 05, April 18-22 2005, Barcelona, Spain.

Aris Alissandrakis, Chrystopher Nehaniv, Kerstin Dautenhahn and Joe Saunders, An Approach for Programming Robots by Demonstration to Manipulate Objects : considerations on Metrics to Achieve Corresponding Effects, Submitted to ICRA 05, April 18-22 2005, Barcelona, Spain.

Jansen, Bart, ten Thij, Tom, Belpaeme, Tony, De Vylder, Bart and de Boer, Bart (2004) Imitation in embodied agents results in self-organization of behavior. In Schaal, S., Ijspeert, A.J., Billard, A., Vijayakumar, S., Hallam, J. and Meyer, J.-A. (eds.) From animals to animats 8. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 455-466

Relevant Links

Workshop organised during ICRA2005 on 'The Social Mechanisms of Robot Programming by Demonstration' organised by two COGNIRON partners (EPFL and UniKarl).