On-line learning and planning in a pick-and-place task demonstrated through body manipulation

When a robot is brought into a new environment, it has a very limited knowledge of what surrounds it and what it can do. One way to build up that knowledge is through exploration but it is a slow process. Programming by demonstration is an efficient way to learn new things from interaction. A robot can imitate gestures it was shown through passive manipulation. Depending on the representation of the task, the robot may also be able to plan its actions and even adapt its representation when further interactions change its knowledge about the task to be done. In this paper we present a bio-inspired neural network used in a robot to learn arm gestures demonstrated through passive manipulation. It also allows the robot to plan arm movements according to activated goals. The model is applied to learning a pick-and-place task. The robot learns how to pick up objects at a specific location and drop them in two different boxes depending on their color. As our system is continuously learning, the behavior of the robot can always be adapted by the human interacting with it. This ability is demonstrated by teaching the robot to switch the goals for both types of objects.