An Open Tele-Impedance Framework to Generate Data for Contact-Rich Tasks in Robotic Manipulation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-cost, open-access tele-impedance framework for collecting large datasets of expert demonstrations in contact-rich robotic manipulation, facilitating reinforcement learning applications.

Contribution

It presents a novel, affordable tele-impedance data collection system tailored for RL, addressing limitations of existing methods in impedance regulation and complexity.

Findings

Framework enables human experts to demonstrate contact-rich tasks effectively.

Supports large-scale data collection for impedance-based RL.

Open-access design promotes widespread adoption and research.

Abstract

Using large datasets in machine learning has led to outstanding results, in some cases outperforming humans in tasks that were believed impossible for machines. However, achieving human-level performance when dealing with physically interactive tasks, e.g., in contact-rich robotic manipulation, is still a big challenge. It is well known that regulating the Cartesian impedance for such operations is of utmost importance for their successful execution. Approaches like reinforcement Learning (RL) can be a promising paradigm for solving such problems. More precisely, approaches that use task-agnostic expert demonstrations to bootstrap learning when solving new tasks have a huge potential since they can exploit large datasets. However, existing data collection systems are expensive, complex, or do not allow for impedance regulation. This work represents a first step towards a data collection framework suitable for collecting large datasets of impedance-based expert demonstrations compatible with the RL problem formulation, where a novel action space is used. The framework is designed according to requirements acquired after an extensive analysis of available data collection frameworks for robotics manipulation. The result is a low-cost and open-access tele-impedance framework which makes human experts capable of demonstrating contact-rich tasks.