Robot Learning by Demonstration with local Gaussian process regression

In recent years there was a tremendous progress in robotic systems, and however also increased expectations: A robot should be easy to program and reliable in task execution. Learning from Demonstration (LfD) offers a very promising alternative to classical engineering approaches. LfD is a very natural way for humans to interact with robots and will be an essential part of future service robots. In this work we first review heteroscedastic Gaussian processes and show how these can be used to encode a task. We then introduce a new Gaussian process regression model that clusters the input space into smaller subsets similar to the work in [11]. In the next step we show how these approaches fit into the Learning by Demonstration framework of [2], [3]. At the end we present an experiment on a real robot arm that shows how all these approaches interact.