Challenges in adapting imitation and reinforcement learning to compliant robots

Sylvain Calinon

Department of Advanced Robotics (ADVR), Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)
sylvain.calinon@iit.it

Abstract

There is an exponential increase of the range of tasks that robots are forecasted to accomplish. (Re)programming these robots becomes a critical issue for their commercialization and for their applications to real-world scenarios in which users without expertise in robotics wish to adapt the robot to their needs. This paper addresses the problem of designing userfriendly human-robot interfaces to transfer skills in a fast and efficient manner. This paper presents recent work conducted at the Learning and Interaction group at ADVR-IIT, ranging from skill acquisition through kinesthetic teaching to self-refinement strategies initiated from demonstrations. Our group started to explore the use of imitation and exploration strategies that can take advantage of the compliant capabilities of recent robot hardware and control architectures.