Knowledge-Driven Robot Program Synthesis from Human VR Demonstrations
This addresses the need for easier robot instruction in open-ended manipulation tasks, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing cognitive architectures and methods.
The paper tackles the problem of generating executable robot control programs from human VR demonstrations by leveraging common-sense knowledge and physics simulation, demonstrating it in a force-sensitive fetch-and-place task for a robotic shopping assistant.
Aging societies, labor shortages and increasing wage costs call for assistance robots capable of autonomously performing a wide array of real-world tasks. Such open-ended robotic manipulation requires not only powerful knowledge representations and reasoning (KR&R) algorithms, but also methods for humans to instruct robots what tasks to perform and how to perform them. In this paper, we present a system for automatically generating executable robot control programs from human task demonstrations in virtual reality (VR). We leverage common-sense knowledge and game engine-based physics to semantically interpret human VR demonstrations, as well as an expressive and general task representation and automatic path planning and code generation, embedded into a state-of-the-art cognitive architecture. We demonstrate our approach in the context of force-sensitive fetch-and-place for a robotic shopping assistant. The source code is available at https://github.com/ease-crc/vr-program-synthesis.