Robotics: Science and Systems XVII

Learning Riemannian Manifolds for Geodesic Motion Skills

Hadi Beik-Mohammadi, Søren Hauberg, Georgios Arvanitidis, Gerhard Neumann, Leonel Rozo

Abstract:

For robots to work alongside humans and perform in unstructured environments; they must learn new motion skills and adapt them to unseen situations on the fly. This demands learning models that capture relevant motion patterns; while offering enough flexibility to adapt the encoded skills to new requirements; such as dynamic obstacle avoidance. We introduce a Riemannian manifold perspective on this problem; and propose to learn a Riemannian manifold from human demonstrations on which geodesics are natural motion skills. We realize this with a variational autoencoder (VAE) over the space of position and orientations of the robot end-effector. Geodesic motion skills let a robot plan movements from and to arbitrary points on the data manifold. They also provide a straightforward method to avoid obstacles by redefining the ambient metric in an online fashion.Moreover; geodesics naturally exploit the manifold resulting from multiple-solution settings to design motions that were not demonstrated previously. We test our learning framework usinga7-DoF robotic manipulator; where the robot satisfactorily learns and reproduces realistic skills featuring elaborated motion patterns; avoids previously–unseen obstacles; and generates novel movements in multiple-solution settings.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Beik-Mohammadi-RSS-21, 
    AUTHOR    = {Hadi Beik-Mohammadi AND Søren Hauberg AND Georgios Arvanitidis AND Gerhard Neumann AND Leonel Rozo}, 
    TITLE     = {{Learning Riemannian Manifolds for Geodesic Motion Skills}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2021}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Virtual}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2021.XVII.082} 
}