Robotics: Science and Systems XVIII

Human-to-Robot Imitation in the Wild

Shikhar Bahl, Abhinav Gupta, Deepak Pathak

Abstract:

We approach the problem of learning from watching humans in the wild. While traditional approaches in Imitation and Reinforcement Learning are promising for learning in the real world, they are either sample inefficient or are constrained to lab settings. Meanwhile, there has been a lot of success in processing passive, unstructured human data. We propose tackling this problem via an efficient one-shot robot learning algorithm, centered around learning from a third person perspective. We call our method WHIRL: In the Wild Human-Imitated Robot Learning. In WHIRL, we aim to use human videos to gather a prior over the intent of the demonstrator, advances in computer vision, and use this to initialize our agent's policy. We introduce an efficient real-world policy learning scheme, that improves over the human prior using interactions. Our key contributions are a simple sampling-based policy optimization approach, a novel objective function for aligning human and robot videos as well as an exploration method to boost sample efficiency. We show, one-shot, generalization and success in real world settings, including 20 different manipulation tasks in the wild.

Download:

Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{Bahl-RSS-22, 
    AUTHOR    = {Shikhar Bahl AND Abhinav Gupta AND Deepak Pathak}, 
    TITLE     = {{Human-to-Robot Imitation in the Wild}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2022}, 
    ADDRESS   = {New York City, NY, USA}, 
    MONTH     = {June}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2022.XVIII.026} 
}