Object Manipulation Learning by Imitation

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for robots to learn object manipulation skills through imitation by automatically segmenting demonstrations, formulating appropriate RL problems, and considering private information like tactile sensations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach that automatically segments demonstrations, formulates RL problems for each skill, and assesses the importance of private information, advancing imitation learning in robotics.

Findings

Robot successfully learned to pick and stack blocks by imitation.

Demonstration segmentation and RL problem formulation were effective.

The method considers private information, improving learning accuracy.

Abstract

We aim to enable robot to learn object manipulation by imitation. Given external observations of demonstrations on object manipulations, we believe that two underlying problems to address in learning by imitation is 1) segment a given demonstration into skills that can be individually learned and reused, and 2) formulate the correct RL (Reinforcement Learning) problem that only considers the relevant aspects of each skill so that the policy for each skill can be effectively learned. Previous works made certain progress in this direction, but none has taken private information into account. The public information is the information that is available in the external observations of demonstration, and the private information is the information that are only available to the agent that executes the actions, such as tactile sensations. Our contribution is that we provide a method for the robot to automatically segment the demonstration of object manipulations into multiple skills, and formulate the correct RL problem for each skill, and automatically decide whether the private information is an important aspect of each skill based on interaction with the world. Our experiment shows that our robot learns to pick up a block, and stack it onto another block by imitating an observed demonstration. The evaluation is based on 1) whether the demonstration is reasonably segmented, 2) whether the correct RL problems are formulated, 3) and whether a good policy is learned.