Learning Multiple Collaborative Tasks with a Mixture of Interaction Primitives

Abstract

Robots that interact with humans must learn to not only adapt to different human partners but also to new interactions. Such a form of learning can be achieved by demonstrations and imitation. A recently introduced method to learn interactions from demonstrations is the framework of Interaction Primitives. While this framework is limited to represent and generalize a single interaction pattern, in practice, interactions between a human and a robot can consist of many different patterns. To overcome this limitation this paper proposes a Mixture of Interaction Primitives to learn multiple interaction patterns from unlabeled demonstrations.Specifically the proposed method uses Gaussian Mixture Mod-els of Interaction Primitives to model nonlinear correlations between the movements of the different agents. We validate our algorithm with two experiments involving interactive tasks between a human and a lightweight robotic arm. In the first,we compare our proposed method with conventional Interaction Primitives in a toy problem scenario where the robot and the human are not linearly correlated. In the second, we present a proof-of-concept experiment where the robot assists a human in assembling a box.

Publication
Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)