Motion Planning of Flexible Manipulators by Learning from Human Expert Demonstrations

Abstract

Motion Planning of Multiple-segment flexible soft, and continuum Flexible Manipulators by Learning from Human Expert Demonstrations

Multiple-segment flexible and soft robotic actuators exhibit compliance but suffer from the difficulty of path planning due to their redundant degrees of freedom, although they are promising in complex tasks such as crossing body cavities to grasp objects. We propose a learning from demonstration method to plan the motion paths of flexible manipulators, by statistics machine-learning algorithms. To encode demonstrated trajectories and estimate suitable paths for the manipulators to reproduce the task, models are built based on Gaussian Mixture Model and Gaussian Mixture Regression respectively. The forward and inverse kinematic models of soft robotic arm are derived for the motion control. A flexible and soft robotic manipulator verifies the learned paths by successfully completing a representative task of navigating through a narrow keyhole.


 

Demo video at:

 

Publications

  • H. Wang; J. Chen; H. Y. Lau & H. Ren Motion Planning of IPMC Flexible Manipulators by Learning from Human Expert Demonstrations ICRA2016, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2016
  • J. Chen; H. REN & A. Lau Learning Reaching Movement Primitives from Human Demonstrations with Gaussian Mixture Regression and Stabilized Dynamical Systems International Conference on Control Science and Systems Engineering ICCSSE 2016, 2016
  • J. Chen; W. Xu; A. Lau & H. REN Towards Transferring Skills to Flexible Surgical Robots with Programming by Demonstration and Reinforcement Learning The Eighth International Conference on Advanced Computational Intelligence (ICACI2016), 2016
  • J. Chen; W. Xu; H. Ren & H. Y. Lau Automate Adaptive Robot Reaching Movement Based on Learning from Human Demonstrations with Dynamical Systems ROBIO2016, 2016