Efficient Programming of Manipulation Tasks by Demonstration and Adaptation

Abstract

Programming by Demonstration (PbD) is a promising technique for programming mobile manipulators to perform complex tasks, such as stocking shelves in retail environments. However, programming such tasks purely by demonstration can be cumbersome and time-consuming as they involve many steps and they are different for each item being manipulated. We propose a system that allows programming new tasks with a combination of demonstration and adaptation. This approach eliminates the need to demonstrate repetitions within one task or variations of a task for different items, replacing those demonstrations with a much more time-efficient adaptation procedure. We develop a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that enables the adaptation procedure. This GUI allows grouping, duplicating, removing, reordering, and repositioning parts of a demonstration to adapt and extend it. We implement our approach on a single-armed mobile manipulator. We evaluate our system on several test scenarios with one expert user and four novice users. We demonstrate that the combination of demonstration and adaptation requires substantially less time to program than purely by demonstration.

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{elliott2017romanefficient,
  title = {Efficient Programming of Manipulation Tasks by Demonstration and Adaptation},
  author = {Elliott, Sarah and Toris, Russell and Cakmak, Maya},
  year = {2017},
  booktitle = {Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2017 26th IEEE International Symposium on},
  pages = {1146--1153},
  doi = {10.1109/ROMAN.2017.8172448},
  isbn = {978-1-5386-3518-6},
  issn = {1944-9437},
  type = {conference},
  organization = {IEEE}
}