Learning Reach-to-Grasp Motions From Human Demonstrations

Reaching over to grasp an item is arguably the most commonly used motor skill by humans. Even under sudden perturbations, humans seem to react rapidly and adapt their motion to guarantee success. Despite the apparent ease and frequency with which we use this ability, a complete understanding of the underlying mechanisms cannot be claimed. It is partly due to such incomplete knowledge that adaptive robot motion for reaching and grasping under perturbations is not perfectly achieved. In this thesis, we take the discriminative approach for modelling trajectories of reach-to-grasp motion from expert demonstrations. Throughout this thesis, we will employ time-independent (autonomous) flow based representations to learn reactive motion controllers which can then be ported onto robots. This thesis is divided into three main parts. The first part is dedicated to biologically inspired modelling of reach-to-grasp motions with respect to the hand-arm coupling. We build upon previous work in motion modelling using autonomous dynamical systems (DS) and present a coupled dynamical system (CDS) model of these two subsystems. The coupled model ensures satisfaction of the constraints between the hand and the arm subsystems which are critical to the success of a reach-to-grasp task. Moreover, it reduces the complexity of the overall motion planning problem as compared to considering a combined problem for the hand and the arm motion. In the second part we extend the CDS approach to incorporate multiple grasping points. Such a model is beneficial due to the fact that many daily life objects afford multiple grasping locations on their surface. We combine a DS based approach with energy-function learning to learn a multiple attractor dynamical system where the attractors are mapped to the desired grasping points. We present the Augmented-SVM (ASVM) model that combines the classical SVM formulation with gradient constraints arising from the energy function to learn the desired dynamical function for motion generation. In the last part of this thesis, we address the problem of inverse-kinematics and obstacle avoidance by combining our flow-based motion generator with global configuration-space planners. We claim that the two techniques complement each other. On one hand, the fast reactive nature of our flow based motion generator can used to guide the search of a randomly exploring random tree (RRT) based global planner. On the other hand, global planners can efficiently handle arbitrary obstacles and avoid local minima present in the dynamical function learned from demonstrations. We show that combining the information from demonstrations with global planning in the form of a energy-map considerably decreases the computational complexity of state-of-the-art sampling based planners. We believe that this thesis has the following contributions to Robotics and Machine Learning. First, we have developed algorithms for fast and adaptive motion generation for reach-grasp motions. Second, we formulated an extension to the classical SVM formulation that takes into account the gradient information from data. We showed that instead of being limited as a classifier or a regressor, the SVM framework can be used as a more general function approximation technique. Lastly, we have combined our local methods with global approaches for planning to achieve arbitrary obstacle avoidance and considerable reduction in the computation complexity of the global planners.