Publication
A probabilistic approach to robot trajectory generation
Alexandros Paraschos; Gerhard Neumann; Jan Peters
In: 13th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots. IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids-2013), October 15-17, Atlanta, GA, USA, Pages 477-483, IEEE, 2013.
Abstract
Motor Primitives (MPs) are a promising approach for the data-driven acquisition as well as for the modular and re-usable generation of movements. However, a modular control architecture with MPs is only effective if the MPs support co-activation as well as continuously blending the activation from one MP to the next. In addition, we need efficient mechanisms to adapt a MP to the current situation. Common approaches to movement primitives lack such capabilities or their implementation is based on heuristics. We present a probabilistic movement primitive approach that overcomes the limitations of existing approaches. We encode a primitive as a probability distribution over trajectories. The representation as distribution has several beneficial properties. It allows encoding a time-varying variance profile. Most importantly, it allows performing new operations - a product of distributions for the co-activation of MPs conditioning for generalizing the MP to different desired targets. We derive a feedback controller that reproduces a given trajectory distribution in closed form. We compare our approach to the existing state-of-the art and present real robot results for learning from demonstration.