Superpositioning of Behaviors Learned Through Teleoperation
Christina L. Campbell, Richard A. Peters II, Robert E. Bodenheimer, William J. Bluethmann, Eric Huber, and Robert O. Ambrose
Abstract
This paper reports that the superposition of a small set of behaviors,
learned via teleoperation, can lead to robust completion of an
articulated reach-and-grasp task. The results support the hypothesis
that a robot can learn to interact purpose- fully with its environment
through a developmental acquisition of sensory-motor
coordination. Teleoperation can bootstrap the process by enabling the
robot to observe its own sensory responses to actions that lead to
specific outcomes within an environment. It is shown that a
reach-and-grasp task, learned by an articulated robot through a small
number of teleoperated trials, can be performed autonomously with
success in the face of significant variations in the environment and
perturbations of the goal. In particular, teleoperation of the robot
to reach and grasp an object at nine different locations in its
workspace enabled ro- bust autonomous performance of the task anywhere
within the workspace. Superpositioning was performed using the Verbs
and Adverbs algorithm that was developed originally for the graphical
animation of articulated characters. The work was performed on
Robonaut, the NASA space-capable humanoid at Johnson Space Center,
Houston, TX.
Index Terms Dexterous manipulators, intelligent robots, non-linear
functions, robot programming, telerobotics.
IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 22(1), pp. 79-91, February 2006.
Bobby Bodenheimer 