Robotics: Science and Systems XVII

Manipulator-Independent Representations for Visual Imitation

Yuxiang Zhou, Yusuf Aytar, Konstantinos Bousmalis

Abstract:

Imitation learning is an effective tool for robotic learning tasks where specifying a reinforcement learning (RL) reward is not feasible or where the exploration problem is particularly difficult. Imitation; typically behavior cloning or inverse RL; derive a policy from a collection of first-person action-state trajectories. This is contrary to how humans and other animals imitate: we observe a behavior; even from other species; understand its perceived effect on the state of the environment; and figure out what actions our body can perform to reach a similar outcome. In this work; we explore the possibility of third-person visual imitation of manipulation trajectories; only from vision and without access to actions; demonstrated by embodiments different to the ones of our imitating agent. Specifically; we investigate what would be an appropriate representation method with which an RL agent can visually track trajectories of complex manipulation behavior —non-planar with multiple-object interactions— demonstrated by experts with different embodiments. We present a way to train manipulator-independent representations (MIR) that primarily focus on the change in the environment and have all the characteristics that make them suitable for cross-embodiment visual imitation with RL: domain-invariant; temporally smooth; and actionable. We show that with our proposed method our agents are able to imitate; with complex robot control; trajectories from a variety of embodiments and with significant visual and dynamics differences; e.g. simulation-to-reality gap.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Zhou-RSS-21, 
    AUTHOR    = {Yuxiang Zhou AND Yusuf Aytar AND Konstantinos Bousmalis}, 
    TITLE     = {{Manipulator-Independent Representations for Visual Imitation}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2021}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Virtual}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2021.XVII.002} 
}