Tianyi Zhang

Weiming Zhi, Tianyi Zhang, Matthew Johnson-Roberson

Learning for Demonstration (LfD) enables robots to acquire new skills by imitating expert demonstrations, allowing users to communicate their instructions in an intuitive manner. Recent progress in LfD often relies on kinesthetic teaching or teleoperation as the medium for users to specify the demonstrations. Kinesthetic teaching requires physical handling of the robot, while teleoperation demands proficiency with additional hardware. This paper introduces an alternative paradigm for LfD called Diagrammatic Teaching. Diagrammatic Teaching aims to teach robots novel skills by prompting the user to sketch out demonstration trajectories on 2D images of the scene, these are then synthesised as a generative model of motion trajectories in 3D task space. Additionally, we present the Ray-tracing Probabilistic Trajectory Learning (RPTL) framework for Diagrammatic Teaching. RPTL extracts time-varying probability densities from the 2D sketches, applies ray-tracing to find corresponding regions in 3D Cartesian space, and fits a probabilistic model of motion trajectories to these regions. New motion trajectories, which mimic those sketched by the user, can then be generated from the probabilistic model. We empirically validate our framework both in simulation and on real robots, which include a fixed-base manipulator and a quadruped-mounted manipulator.

Weiming Zhi, Tianyi Zhang, Matthew Johnson-Roberson

Diagrammatic Teaching is a paradigm for robots to acquire novel skills, whereby the user provides 2D sketches over images of the scene to shape the robot's motion. In this work, we tackle the problem of teaching a robot to approach a surface and then follow cyclic motion on it, where the cycle of the motion can be arbitrarily specified by a single user-provided sketch over an image from the robot's camera. Accordingly, we contribute the Stable Diffeomorphic Diagrammatic Teaching (SDDT) framework. SDDT models the robot's motion as an Orbitally Asymptotically Stable (O.A.S.) dynamical system that learns to stablize based on a single diagrammatic sketch provided by the user. This is achieved by applying a \emph{diffeomorphism}, i.e. a differentiable and invertible function, to morph a known O.A.S. system. The parameterised diffeomorphism is then optimised with respect to the Hausdorff distance between the limit cycle of our modelled system and the sketch, to produce the desired robot motion. We provide novel theoretical insight into the behaviour of the optimised system and also empirically evaluate SDDT, both in simulation and on a quadruped with a mounted 6-DOF manipulator. Results show that we can diagrammatically teach complex cyclic motion patterns with a high degree of accuracy.