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research article

Learning from demonstration using products of experts: Applications to manipulation and task prioritization

Pignat, Emmanuel
•
Silverio, Joao
•
Calinon, Sylvain  
September 22, 2021
International Journal Of Robotics Research

Probability distributions are key components of many learning from demonstration (LfD) approaches, with the spaces chosen to represent tasks playing a central role. Although the robot configuration is defined by its joint angles, end-effector poses are often best explained within several task spaces. In many approaches, distributions within relevant task spaces are learned independently and only combined at the control level. This simplification implies several problems that are addressed in this work. We show that the fusion of models in different task spaces can be expressed as products of experts (PoE), where the probabilities of the models are multiplied and renormalized so that it becomes a proper distribution of joint angles. Multiple experiments are presented to show that learning the different models jointly in the PoE framework significantly improves the quality of the final model. The proposed approach particularly stands out when the robot has to learn hierarchical objectives that arise when a task requires the prioritization of several sub-tasks (e.g. in a humanoid robot, keeping balance has a higher priority than reaching for an object). Since training the model jointly usually relies on contrastive divergence, which requires costly approximations that can affect performance, we propose an alternative strategy using variational inference and mixture model approximations. In particular, we show that the proposed approach can be extended to PoE with a nullspace structure (PoENS), where the model is able to recover secondary tasks that are masked by the resolution of tasks of higher-importance.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1177/02783649211040561
Web of Science ID

WOS:000701725400001

Author(s)
Pignat, Emmanuel
Silverio, Joao
Calinon, Sylvain  
Date Issued

2021-09-22

Published in
International Journal Of Robotics Research
Article Number

02783649211040561

Subjects

Robotics

•

product of experts

•

learning from demonstration

•

task prioritization

•

nullspace learning and control

•

space

•

approximation

•

distributions

•

imitation

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LIDIAP  
Available on Infoscience
October 9, 2021
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/181941
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