We present a novel, reusable and task-agnostic primitive for assessing the outcome of a force-interaction robotic skill, useful e.g. for applications such as quality control in industrial manufacturing. The proposed method is easily programmed by kinesthetic teaching, and the desired adaptability and reusability are achieved by machine learning models. The primitive records sensory data during both demonstrations and reproductions of a movement. Recordings include the end-effector's Cartesian pose and exerted wrench at each time step. The collected data are then used to train Gaussian Processes which create models of the wrench as a function of the robot's pose. The similarity between the wrench models of the demonstration and the movement's reproduction is derived by measuring their Hellinger distance. This comparison creates features that are fed as inputs to a Naive Bayes classifier which estimates the movement's probability of success. The evaluation is performed on two diverse robotic assembly tasks -- snap-fitting and screwing -- with a total of 5 use cases, 11 demonstrations, and more than 200 movement executions. The performance metrics prove the proposed method's capability of generalization to different demonstrations and movements.
In the field of reinforcement learning, Pastor al @cite_0 propose an algorithm which learns the outcome of an assessment system given a predefined threshold based on a reward function. The system is merged with reinforcement learning framework. However, the definition of the reward function may be challenging for certain tasks and also limits the method's re-usability.
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The goal of reinforcement learning algorithms is to estimate and or optimise the value function. However, unlike supervised learning, no teacher or oracle is available to provide the true value function. Instead, the majority of reinforcement learning algorithms estimate and or optimise a proxy for the value function. This proxy is typically based on a sampled and bootstrapped approximation to the true value function, known as a . The particular choice of return is one of the chief components determining the nature of the algorithm: the rate at which future rewards are discounted; when and how values should be bootstrapped; or even the nature of the rewards themselves. It is well-known that these decisions are crucial to the overall success of RL algorithms. We introduce a novel, gradient-based meta-learning algorithm that is able to adapt the nature of the return, online, whilst interacting and learning from the environment. When applied to 57 games on the Atari 2600 environment over 200 million frames, our algorithm achieved a new state-of-the-art.