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National Science Foundation Award #0535269

Human-to-Robot Skill Transfer

 
Investigator(s): Gregory Grudic (PI) ; I. Jane Mulligan (Co-PI)
Sponsor: University of Colorado at Boulder, CO 80309 3034926221
Start Date/Expiration Date 2005-11-01 to 2006-10-31 (amended 2005-10-25)
Awarded Amount to Date: $145,009
Abstract: Programming robots that function robustly in unstructured environments has met with limited success. In contrast, humans can often successfully teleoperate a robot to accomplish complex tasks in natural environments, using only the robot's sensors and actuators. The goal of this proposal is to exploit the knowledge encoded in the actions of human teleoperators to learn more robust controllers for autonomous robot tasks. The first step is to refine the huge volumes of data available to the robot to a set of features or percepts, which are both tractable for our systems to process, and sufficient to perform the task at hand. One way to empirically satisfy these constraints is to demonstrate whether a human user can execute the task in a teleoperation setting, given only the displayed sensor features. We will identify task appropriate feature sets by analysis of teleoperator performance (success, speed, distance etc.) under displayed feature combinations. The proposed approach to learning robust controllers can be summarized as: 1) a human demonstrates a task remotely; 2) recorded sensor sequences are used to learn compact low dimensional manifolds that represent regions of the feature space safe for a robot to traverse; 3) a reinforcement learning paradigm is employed to find task-optimal paths within the manifolds. The skill or task is considered mastered when the robot's performance equals or exceeds the human's. The learned controller autonomously directs the robot, and reinforcement reward is used to autonomously optimize it. However, whenever the robot runs into difficulties, the human operator can take over, generating new examples used to modify and refine the manifold.
NSF Org: IIS - Division of Information & Intelligent Systems
Award Number: 0535269
Award Instrument: Continuing grant
Program Manager: C.S. George Lee
IIS Division of Information & Intelligent Systems
CSE Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering
NSF Program(s): ROBUST INTELLIGENCE
Field Application(s): Information Systems
Program Reference Code(s): ADVANCED SOFTWARE TECH & ALGOR, 9216
ROBUST INTELLIGENCE, 7495
Program Element Code(s): 7495