Efficiently Learning Manipulations by Selecting Structured Skill Representations

October 2022

Efficiently Learning Manipulations by Selecting Structured Skill Representations

Conference Paper
Proceedings of (IROS) IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems

Abstract:

A key challenge in learning to perform manipu- lation tasks is selecting a suitable skill representation. While specific skill representations are often easier to learn, they are often only suitable for a narrow set of tasks. In most prior works, roboticists manually provide the robot with a suitable skill representation to use e.g. a neural network or DMPs. By contrast, we propose to allow the robot to select the most appropriate skill representation for the underlying task. Given the large space of skill representations, we utilize a single demonstration to select a small set of potential task-relevant representations. This set is then further refined using reinforcement learning to select the most suitable skill representation. Experiments in both simulation and real world show how our proposed approach leads to improved sample efficiency and enables directly learning on the real robot.
@conference{Sharma-2022-134574,
author = {Mohit Sharma And Oliver Kroemer},
title = {Efficiently Learning Manipulations by Selecting Structured Skill Representations},
booktitle = {Proceedings of (IROS) IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems},
year = {2022},
month = {October},
}
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