The work presented here results from the development of methods and algorithms that provide robots with the ability to learn from humans, a research topic also known as Robot Programming by Demonstration. Currently, my work primarily focuses on: - Incremental learning of probabilistic models for representing action policies - Probabilistic control policies that try to satisfy task and environmental constraints - Compliance control, to allows human users to provide online feedback to robots - Reinforcement learning To be able to teach something to a robot, machine learning algorithms alone are not sufficient to provide human users with a complete interactive teaching experience. For it to be complete the robot must be capable of "feeling" the user's intentions and to react accordingly. Therefore, strong energy has to be devoted to understand robot control, robot sensing and to developteaching interfaces. How can a robot perceive human's intentions? Which are the important sensory modalities? And how should the robot react and control its actions to human-related sensory inputs?
passive hand, we use a multi-step learning procedure. An initial hand posture is first demonstrated to the robot, which is then physically corrected by a human teacher pressing on the compliant fingers of the robot. These correction-replay steps can then be repeated as long as the model's reproduction is not satisfactory. To illustrate this methodology, in addition to this more scientific video, an entertaining compilation of this work with the one on Learning from tactile corrections (see below) can be found here. Work done in collaboration with Brenna Argall
Computer vision
Finally, computer vision is also a key sensory modality for a robot to be able to interact with its environment. Importantly, vision allows robots to plan their actions toward environmental goals, but also, to react to external perturbations. For instance, let's say that the robot is currently whipping eggs in a bowl. Suddenly, for an arbitrary reason, the bowl is moved. Thanks to vision, the robot will be able to adapt its movements toward the new location of the bowl.(video)
Copyrig