Learning by Watching: Physical Imitation of Manipulation Skills from Human Videos
This addresses the challenge of leveraging human demonstrations for robots without manual specification, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing imitation learning approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of learning robot manipulation skills from a single human video by introducing Learning by Watching (LbW), which uses unsupervised human-to-robot translation and keypoint detection to achieve favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods on five tasks.
Learning from visual data opens the potential to accrue a large range of manipulation behaviors by leveraging human demonstrations without specifying each of them mathematically, but rather through natural task specification. In this paper, we present Learning by Watching (LbW), an algorithmic framework for policy learning through imitation from a single video specifying the task. The key insights of our method are two-fold. First, since the human arms may not have the same morphology as robot arms, our framework learns unsupervised human to robot translation to overcome the morphology mismatch issue. Second, to capture the details in salient regions that are crucial for learning state representations, our model performs unsupervised keypoint detection on the translated robot videos. The detected keypoints form a structured representation that contains semantically meaningful information and can be used directly for computing reward and policy learning. We evaluate the effectiveness of our LbW framework on five robot manipulation tasks, including reaching, pushing, sliding, coffee making, and drawer closing. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art approaches.