End-User Programming of Low- and High-Level Actions for Robotic Task Planning

TL;DR

This paper introduces iRoPro, an interactive framework enabling end-users to teach robots new actions from scratch through demonstration, facilitating reuse in complex tasks with a user-friendly interface and real-time task planning.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel system that allows non-expert users to teach and reuse robot actions via demonstration, with integrated condition inference and real-time task planning.

Findings

System successfully generalizes to six benchmark tasks.

Users with varied backgrounds can easily learn and operate the system.

Taught actions are effectively reused for complex, unseen tasks.

Abstract

Programming robots for general purpose applications is extremely challenging due to the great diversity of end-user tasks ranging from manufacturing environments to personal homes. Recent work has focused on enabling end-users to program robots using Programming by Demonstration. However, teaching robots new actions from scratch that can be reused for unseen tasks remains a difficult challenge and is generally left up to robotic experts. We propose iRoPro, an interactive Robot Programming framework that allows end-users to teach robots new actions from scratch and reuse them with a task planner. In this work we provide a system implementation on a two-armed Baxter robot that (i) allows simultaneous teaching of low- and high-level actions by demonstration, (ii) includes a user interface for action creation with condition inference and modification, and (iii) allows creating and solving previously unseen problems using a task planner for the robot to execute in real-time. We evaluate the generalisation power of the system on six benchmark tasks and show how taught actions can be easily reused for complex tasks. We further demonstrate its usability with a user study (N=21), where users completed eight tasks to teach the robot new actions that are reused with a task planner. The study demonstrates that users with any programming level and educational background can easily learn and use the system.