Multi-Modal Robot Apprenticeship: Imitation Learning Using Linearly Decayed DMP+ in a Human-Robot Dialogue System

Abstract

Robot learning by demonstration gives robots the ability to learn tasks which they have not been programmed to do before. The paradigm allows robots to work in a greater range of real-world applications in our daily life. However, this paradigm has traditionally been applied to learn tasks from a single demonstration modality. This restricts the approach to be scaled to learn and execute a series of tasks in a real-life environment. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal learning approach using DMP+ with linear decay integrated in a dialogue system with speech and ontology for the robot to learn seamlessly through natural interaction modalities (like an apprentice) while learning or re-learning is done on the fly to allow partial updates to a learned task to reduce potential user fatigue and operational downtime in teaching. The performance of new DMP+ with linear decay system is statistically benchmarked against state-of-the-art DMP implementations. A gluing demonstration is also conducted to show how the system provides seamless learning of multiple tasks in a flexible manufacturing set-up.