TY - GEN
T1 - Extracting bimanual synergies with reinforcement learning
AU - Luck, Kevin Sebastian
AU - Ben Amor, Heni
PY - 2017/12/13
Y1 - 2017/12/13
N2 - Motor synergies are an important concept in human motor control. Through the co-activation of multiple muscles, complex motion involving many degrees-of-freedom can be generated. However, leveraging this concept in robotics typically entails using human data that may be incompatible for the kinematics of the robot. In this paper, our goal is to enable a robot to identify synergies for low-dimensional control using trial-and-error only. We discuss how synergies can be learned through latent space policy search and introduce an extension of the algorithm for the re-use of previously learned synergies for exploration. The application of the algorithm on a bimanual manipulation task for the Baxter robot shows that performance can be increased by reusing learned synergies intra-task when learning to lift objects. But the reuse of synergies between two tasks with different objects did not lead to a significant improvement.
AB - Motor synergies are an important concept in human motor control. Through the co-activation of multiple muscles, complex motion involving many degrees-of-freedom can be generated. However, leveraging this concept in robotics typically entails using human data that may be incompatible for the kinematics of the robot. In this paper, our goal is to enable a robot to identify synergies for low-dimensional control using trial-and-error only. We discuss how synergies can be learned through latent space policy search and introduce an extension of the algorithm for the re-use of previously learned synergies for exploration. The application of the algorithm on a bimanual manipulation task for the Baxter robot shows that performance can be increased by reusing learned synergies intra-task when learning to lift objects. But the reuse of synergies between two tasks with different objects did not lead to a significant improvement.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85041953097&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/IROS.2017.8206356
DO - 10.1109/IROS.2017.8206356
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
SP - 4805
EP - 4812
BT - IROS 2017 - IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2017
Y2 - 24 September 2017 through 28 September 2017
ER -