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Publication

Learning interaction for collaborative tasks with probabilistic movement primitives

Guilherme Maeda; Marco Ewerton; Rudolf Lioutikov; Heni Ben Amor; Jan Peters; Gerhard Neumann
In: 14th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots. IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids-2014), November 18-20, Madrid, Spain, Pages 527-534, IEEE, 2014.

Abstract

This paper proposes a probabilistic framework based on movement primitives for robots that work in collaboration with a human coworker. Since the human coworker can execute a variety of unforeseen tasks a requirement of our system is that the robot assistant must be able to adapt and learn new skills on-demand, without the need of an expert programmer. Thus, this paper leverages on the framework of imitation learning and its application to human-robot interaction using the concept of Interaction Primitives (IPs). We introduce the use of Probabilistic Movement Primitives (ProMPs) to devise an interaction method that both recognizes the action of a human and generates the appropriate movement primitive of the robot assistant. We evaluate our method on experiments using a lightweight arm interacting with a human partner and also using motion capture trajectories of two humans assembling a box. The advantages of ProMPs in relation to the original formulation for interaction are exposed and compared.

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