A Framework of Hybrid Force/Motion Skills Learning for Robots

WANG, Ning, CHEN, Chuize and DI NUOVO, Alessandro (2020). A Framework of Hybrid Force/Motion Skills Learning for Robots. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, p. 1.

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Abstract

Human factors and human-centred design philosophy are highly desired in today’s robotics applications such as human-robot interaction (HRI). Several studies showed that endowing robots of human-like interaction skills can not only make them more likeable but also improve their performance. In particular, skill transfer by imitation learning can increase usability and acceptability of robots by the users without computer programming skills. In fact, besides positional information, muscle stiffness of the human arm, contact force with the environment also play important roles in understanding and generating human-like manipulation behaviours for robots, e.g., in physical HRI and tele-operation. To this end, we present a novel robot learning framework based on Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMPs), taking into consideration both the positional and the contact force profiles for human-robot skills transferring. Distinguished from the conventional method involving only the motion information, the proposed framework combines two sets of DMPs, which are built to model the motion trajectory and the force variation of the robot manipulator, respectively. Thus, a hybrid force/motion control approach is taken to ensure the accurate tracking and reproduction of the desired positional and force motor skills. Meanwhile, in order to simplify the control system, a momentum-based force observer is applied to estimate the contact force instead of employing force sensors. To deploy the learned motion-force robot manipulation skills to a broader variety of tasks, the generalization of these DMP models in actual situations is also considered. Comparative experiments have been conducted using a Baxter Robot to verify the effectiveness of the proposed learning framework on real-world scenarios like cleaning a table.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2020 IEEE.  Personal use of this material is permitted.  Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1109/tcds.2020.2968056
Page Range:	p. 1
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Elements
Depositing User:	Symplectic Elements
Date Deposited:	27 Jan 2020 16:57
Last Modified:	18 Mar 2021 01:08
URI:	https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/25723

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