Synthesizing Robot Manipulation Programs from a Single Observed Human Demonstration

Abstract

Programming by Demonstration (PbD) lets users with little technical background program a wide variety of manipulation tasks for robots, but it should be as intuitive as possible for users while requiring as little time as possible. In this paper, we present a Programming by Demonstration system that synthesizes manipulation programs from a single observed demonstration, allowing users to program new tasks for a robot simply by performing the task once themselves. A human-in-the-loop interface helps users make corrections to the perceptual state as needed. We introduce Object Interaction Programs as a representation of multi-object, bimanual manipulation tasks and present algorithms for extracting programs from observed demonstrations and transferring programs to a robot to perform the task in a new scene. We demonstrate the expressivity and generalizability of our approach through an evaluation on a benchmark of complex tasks.