Publication
Learning motor primitives for robotics
Jens Kober; Jan Peters
In: 2009 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA-2009), May 12-17, Kobe, Japan, Pages 2112-2118, IEEE, 2009.
Abstract
The acquisition and self-improvement of novel motor skills is among the most important problems in robotics. Motor primitives offer one of the most promising frameworks for the application of machine learning techniques in this context. Employing an improved form of the dynamic systems motor primitives originally introduced by Ijspeert et al. [2], we show how both discrete and rhythmic tasks can be learned using a concerted approach of both imitation and reinforcement learning. For doing so, we present both learning algorithms and representations targeted for the practical application in robotics. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to include a start-up phase in rhythmic primitives. We show that two new motor skills, i.e., Ball-in-a-Cup and Ball-Paddling, can be learned on a real Barrett WAM robot arm at a pace similar to human learning while achieving a significantly more reliable final performance.