Personal robots assisting humans must perform complex manipulation tasks that are typically difficult to specify in traditional motion planning pipelines, where multiple objectives must be met and the high-level context be taken into consideration. Learning from demonstration (LfD) provides a promising way to learn these kind of complex manipulation skills even from non-technical users. However, it is challenging for existing LfD methods to efficiently learn skills that can generalize to task specifications that are not covered by demonstrations. In this paper, we introduce a state transition model (STM) that generates joint-space trajectories by imitating motions from expert behavior. Given a few demonstrations, we show in real robot experiments that the learned STM can quickly generalize to unseen tasks and synthesize motions having longer time horizons than the expert trajectories. Compared to conventional motion planners, our approach enables the robot to accomplish complex behaviors from high-level instructions without laborious hand-engineering of planning objectives, while being able to adapt to changing goals during the skill execution. In conjunction with a trajectory optimizer, our STM can construct a high-quality skeleton of a trajectory that can be further improved in smoothness and precision. In combination with a learned inverse dynamics model, we additionally present results where the STM is used as a high-level planner. A video of our experiments is available at this https URL
In our work, we are leveraging recent advancements in recurrent network training to learn sequences of robot states. Auto-conditioned Recurrent Neural Networks @cite_23 are used to synthesize complex trajectories over large time spans.
@cite_23
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Recurrent Neural Networks can be trained to produce sequences of tokens given some input, as exemplified by recent results in machine translation and image captioning. The current approach to training them consists of maximizing the likelihood of each token in the sequence given the current (recurrent) state and the previous token. At inference, the unknown previous token is then replaced by a token generated by the model itself. This discrepancy between training and inference can yield errors that can accumulate quickly along the generated sequence. We propose a curriculum learning strategy to gently change the training process from a fully guided scheme using the true previous token, towards a less guided scheme which mostly uses the generated token instead. Experiments on several sequence prediction tasks show that this approach yields significant improvements. Moreover, it was used successfully in our winning entry to the MSCOCO image captioning challenge, 2015. Recurrent Neural Networks can be trained to produce sequences of tokens given some input, as exemplified by recent results in machine translation and image captioning. The current approach to training them consists of maximizing the likelihood of each token in the sequence given the current (recurrent) state and the previous token. At inference, the unknown previous token is then replaced by a token generated by the model itself. This discrepancy between training and inference can yield errors that can accumulate quickly along the generated sequence. We propose a curriculum learning strategy to gently change the training process from a fully guided scheme using the true previous token, towards a less guided scheme which mostly uses the generated token instead. Experiments on several sequence prediction tasks show that this approach yields significant improvements. Moreover, it was used succesfully in our winning entry to the MSCOCO image captioning challenge, 2015. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been a prominent concept within artificial intelligence. They are inspired by Biological Neural Networks (BNNs) and provide an intuitive and abstract representation of how BNNs work. Derived from the more generic Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), the recurrent ones are meant to be used for temporal tasks, such as speech recognition, because they are capable of memorizing historic input. However, such networks are very time consuming to train as a result of their inherent nature. Recently, Echo State Networks and Liquid State Machines have been proposed as possible RNN alternatives, under the name of Reservoir Computing (RC). RCs are far more easy to train. In this paper, Cellular Automata are used as reservoir, and are tested on the 5-bit memory task (a well known benchmark within the RC community). The work herein provides a method of mapping binary inputs from the task onto the automata, and a recurrent architecture for handling the sequential aspects of it. Furthermore, a layered (deep) reservoir architecture is proposed. Performances are compared towards earlier work, in addition to its single-layer version. Results show that the single CA reservoir system yields similar results to state-of-the-art work. The system comprised of two layered reservoirs do show a noticeable improvement compared to a single CA reservoir. This indicates potential for further research and provides valuable insight on how to design CA reservoir systems. Countless learning tasks require dealing with sequential data. Image captioning, speech synthesis, and music generation all require that a model produce outputs that are sequences. In other domains, such as time series prediction, video analysis, and musical information retrieval, a model must learn from inputs that are sequences. Interactive tasks, such as translating natural language, engaging in dialogue, and controlling a robot, often demand both capabilities. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are connectionist models that capture the dynamics of sequences via cycles in the network of nodes. Unlike standard feedforward neural networks, recurrent networks retain a state that can represent information from an arbitrarily long context window. Although recurrent neural networks have traditionally been dicult to train, and often contain millions of parameters, recent advances in network architectures, optimization techniques, and parallel computation have enabled successful large-scale learning with them. In recent years, systems based on long short-term memory (LSTM) and bidirectional (BRNN) architectures have demonstrated ground-breaking performance on tasks as varied as image captioning, language translation, and handwriting recognition. In this survey, we review and synthesize the research that over the past three decades rst yielded and then made practical these powerful learning models. When appropriate, we reconcile conicting notation and nomenclature. Our goal is to provide a selfcontained explication of the state of the art together with a historical perspective and references to primary research.