Publication
Imitation and Reinforcement Learning for Motor Primitives with Perceptual Coupling
Jens Kober; Betty J. Mohler; Jan Peters
In: Olivier Sigaud; Jan Peters (Hrsg.). From Motor Learning to Interaction Learning in Robots. Pages 209-225, Studies in Computational Intelligence, Vol. 264, Springer, 2010.
Abstract
Traditional motor primitive approaches deal largely with open-loop policies which can only deal with small perturbations. In this paper, we present a new type of motor primitive policies which serve as closed-loop policies together with an appropriate learning algorithm. Our new motor primitives are an augmented version version of the dynamical system-based motor primitives [Ijspeert et al(2002)Ijspeert, Nakanishi, and Schaal] that incorporates perceptual coupling to external variables. We show that these motor primitives can perform complex tasks such as Ball-in-a-Cup or Kendama task even with large variances in the initial conditions where a skilled human player would be challenged. We initialize the open-loop policies by imitation learning and the perceptual coupling with a handcrafted solution. We first improve the open-loop policies and subsequently the perceptual coupling using a novel reinforcement learning method which is particularly well-suited for dynamical system-based motor primitives.