Movement Primitives in Robotics: A Comprehensive Survey

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews movement primitive frameworks in robotics, highlighting their theoretical foundations, applications, and challenges to guide practitioners in implementing these techniques for robotic control tasks.

Contribution

It provides the first systematic review of movement primitive approaches in robotics, analyzing their strengths, weaknesses, and practical challenges for real-world applications.

Findings

Movement primitives effectively encode basic robotic motions.

They possess desirable properties like probabilistic coupling and neural network integration.

Open challenges include scalability and real-time implementation.

Abstract

Biological systems exhibit a continuous stream of movements, consisting of sequential segments, that allow them to perform complex tasks in a creative and versatile fashion. This observation has led researchers towards identifying elementary building blocks of motion known as movement primitives, which are well-suited for generating motor commands in autonomous systems, such as robots. In this survey, we provide an encyclopedic overview of movement primitive approaches and applications in chronological order. Concretely, we present movement primitive frameworks as a way of representing robotic control trajectories acquired through human demonstrations. Within the area of robotics, movement primitives can encode basic motions at the trajectory level, such as how a robot would grasp a cup or the sequence of motions necessary to toss a ball. Furthermore, movement primitives have been developed with the desirable analytical properties of a spring-damper system, probabilistic coupling of multiple demonstrations, using neural networks in high-dimensional systems, and more, to address difficult challenges in robotics. Although movement primitives have widespread application to a variety of fields, the goal of this survey is to inform practitioners on the use of these frameworks in the context of robotics. Specifically, we aim to (i) present a systematic review of major movement primitive frameworks and examine their strengths and weaknesses; (ii) highlight applications that have successfully made use of movement primitives; and (iii) examine open questions and discuss practical challenges when applying movement primitives in robotics.