Perceive, Represent, Generate: Translating Multimodal Information to Robotic Motion Trajectories

Abstract

We present Perceive-Represent-Generate (PRG), a novel three-stage framework that maps perceptual information of different modalities (e.g., visual or sound), corresponding to a series of instructions, to a sequence of movements to be executed by a robot. In the first stage, we perceive and preprocess the given inputs, isolating individual commands from the complete instruction provided by a human user. In the second stage we encode the individual commands into a multimodal latent space, employing a deep generative model. Finally, in the third stage we convert the latent samples into individual trajectories and combine them into a single dynamic movement primitive, allowing its execution by a robotic manipulator. We evaluate our pipeline in the context of a novel robotic handwriting task, where the robot receives as input a word through different perceptual modalities (e.g., image, sound), and generates the corresponding motion trajectory to write it, creating coherent and high-quality handwritten words.