Topic: estimation, prediction Oral presentation or poster presentation Home environments are envisioned as one of the key application areas for service robots. Robots operating in such environments are typically faced with a variety objects they have to deal with or to manipulate to fulfill a given task. Many objects are not rigid since they have moving parts such as drawers or doors. Understanding the spatial movements of parts of such objects is essential for service robots to allow them to plan relevant actions such as door-opening trajectories. Ideally, robots are able to autonomously infer these articulation models by observation. In this work, we therefore investigate the problem of learning kinematic models of articulated objects from observations. As an illustrating example, consider the left three images of Figure 1 which depict two examples for observations of the door of a microwave oven and a learned, one-dimensional description of the door motion. Our problem can be formulated as follows: Given a sequence of rigid body poses from observed objects parts, learn a compact kinematic model describing the whole articulated object. This kinematic model has to define (i) which parts are connected, (ii) the dimensionality of the latent (not observed) actuation space of the object, and (iii) a kinematic function between different body parts in a generative way allowing a robot

This chapter reviews several approaches to the problem of learning by imitation in robotics. We start by describing several cognitive processes identified in the literature as necessary for imitation. We then proceed by surveying different approaches to this problem, placing particular emphasys on methods whereby an agent first learns about its own body dynamics by means of self-exploration and then uses this knowledge about its own body to recognize the actions being performed by other agents. This general approach is related to the motor theory of perception, particularly to the mirror neurons found in primates. We distinguish three fundamental classes of methods, corresponding to three abstraction levels at which imitation can be addressed. As such, the methods surveyed herein exhibit behaviors that range from raw sensory-motor trajectory matching to high-level abstract task replication. We also discuss the impact that knowledge about the world and/or the demonstrator can have on the particular behaviors exhibited.

Abstract — We present an active learning algorithm for the problem of body schema learning, i.e. estimating a kinematic model of a serial robot. The learning process is done online using Recursive Least Squares (RLS) estimation, which outperforms gradient methods usually applied in the literature. In addiction, the method provides the required information to apply an active learning algorithm to find the optimal set of robot configurations and observations to improve the learning process. By selecting the most informative observations, the proposed method minimizes the required amount of data. We have developed an efficient version of the active learning algorithm to select the points in real-time. The algorithms have been tested and compared using both simulated environments and a real humanoid robot. I.

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body schema learning

Robots operating in home environments must be able to interact with articulated objects such as doors or drawers. Ideally, robots are able to autonomously infer articulation models by observation. In this paper, we present an approach to learn kinematic models by inferring the connectivity of rigid parts and the articulation models for the correspondinglinks. Ourmethodusesamixtureofparameterized and parameter-free (Gaussian process) representations and finds low-dimensional manifolds that provide the best explanation of the given observations. Our approach has been implemented and evaluated using real data obtained in various realistichome environment settings.