Tag Archives: Skill Learning

Building a graph of skills in order to leverage already learnt ones in a robotic RL context

November 14, 2024 16:25 ,

Qiangxing Tian, Shanshan Zhang, Donglin Wang, Jinxin Liu, Shuyu Yang, GSC: A graph-based skill composition framework for robot learning, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Volume 182, 2024, DOI: 10.1016/j.robot.2024.104787.

Humans excel at performing a wide range of sophisticated tasks by leveraging skills acquired from prior experiences. This characteristic is especially essential in robotics empowered by deep reinforcement learning, as learning every skill from scratch is time-consuming and may not always be feasible. With the prior skills incorporated, skill composition aims to accelerate the learning process on new robotic tasks. Previous works have given insight into combining pre-trained task-agnostic skills, whereas skills are transformed into fixed order representation, resulting in poor capturing of potential complex skill relations. In this paper, we novelly propose a Graph-based framework for Skill Composition (GSC). To learn rich structural information, a carefully designed skill graph is constructed, where skill representations are taken as nodes and skill relations are utilized as edges. Furthermore, to allow it trained efficiently on large-scale skill set, a transformer-style graph updating method is employed to achieve comprehensive information aggregation. Our simulation experiments indicate that GSC outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on various challenging tasks. Additionally, we successfully apply the technique to the navigation task on a real quadruped robot. The project homepage can be found at Graph Skill Composition.

Posted in: Applications of reinforcement learning to robots , Tagged:

Reducing discovered skills in DRL to the essential ones, modelling skills with SMDP Q-learning

June 7, 2024 10:38 ,

Shuai Qing, Fei Zhu, Refine to the essence: Less-redundant skill learning via diversity clustering, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Volume 133, Part A, 2024 DOI: 10.1016/j.engappai.2024.107981.

In reinforcement learning, skill is a potentially conditional policy that solves tasks in a hierarchically controlled manner. Progress on skill discovery helps agents learn a set of diverse and useful skills without external supervision to tackle complex tasks with sparse rewards. Although most of the studies have aimed to maximize the diversity of skills discovered, the distinguishability between skills diminishes as the number of skills increases, leading to a subset of similar and redundant skills. To tackle this problem, a method called Refine to the Essence of Skills (RE-Skill) is proposed, which aims at learning skills with less redundancy. RE-Skill integrates the concepts of cluster analysis and policy distillation, clustering similar skills together based on their unique features, learning the most optimal performance within each cluster, and filtering out similar skills that involve excessive and intricate actions, thereby reducing redundancy among skills. By refining clusters of similar skills into less-redundant independent skills, RE-Skill demonstrates superior performance compared to other skill discovery algorithms and shows how these less-redundant skills effectively address downstream tasks, indicating that RE-Skill is able to extend its efficacy to engineering applications in robot control and obstacle training tasks within complex environments.

Posted in: Reinforcement learning in AI , Tagged: , , ,

Mixing Monte-Carlo Tree Search with Q-learning for robot learning

June 30, 2023 09:48 ,

Francesco Riccio, Roberto Capobianco, Daniele Nardi, LoOP: Iterative learning for optimistic planning on robots, . Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Volume 36, 2021 DOI: 10.1016/j.robot.2020.103693.

Efficient robotic behaviors require robustness and adaptation to dynamic changes of the environment, whose characteristics rapidly vary during robot operation. To generate effective robot action policies, planning and learning techniques have shown the most promising results. However, if considered individually, they present different limitations. Planning techniques lack generalization among similar states and require experts to define behavioral routines at different levels of abstraction. Conversely, learning methods usually require a considerable number of training samples and iterations of the algorithm. To overcome these issues, and to efficiently generate robot behaviors, we introduce LoOP, an iterative learning algorithm for optimistic planning that combines state-of-the-art planning and learning techniques to generate action policies. The main contribution of LoOP is the combination of Monte-Carlo Search Planning and Q-learning, which enables focused exploration during policy refinement in different robotic applications. We demonstrate the robustness and flexibility of LoOP in various domains and multiple robotic platforms, by validating the proposed approach with an extensive experimental evaluation.

Posted in: Applications of reinforcement learning to robots , Tagged: , ,

A developmental architecture for sensory-motor skills based on predictors, and a nice state-of-the-art in cognitive architectures for sensory-motor skill learning

December 18, 2018 11:13 ,

E. Wieser and G. Cheng, A Self-Verifying Cognitive Architecture for Robust Bootstrapping of Sensory-Motor Skills via Multipurpose Predictors, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 1081-1095, DOI: 10.1109/TCDS.2018.2871857.

The autonomous acquisition of sensory-motor skills along multiple developmental stages is one of the current challenges in robotics. To this end, we propose a new developmental cognitive architecture that combines multipurpose predictors and principles of self-verification for the robust bootstrapping of sensory-motor skills. Our architecture operates with loops formed by both mental simulation of sensory-motor sequences and their subsequent physical trial on a robot. During these loops, verification algorithms monitor the predicted and the physically observed sensory-motor data. Multiple types of predictors are acquired through several developmental stages. As a result, the architecture can select and plan actions, adapt to various robot platforms by adjusting proprioceptive feedback, predict the risk of self-collision, learn from a previous interaction stage by validating and extracting sensory-motor data for training the predictor of a subsequent stage, and finally acquire an internal representation for evaluating the performance of its predictors. These cognitive capabilities in turn realize the bootstrapping of early hand-eye coordination and its improvement. We validate the cognitive capabilities experimentally and, in particular, show an improvement of reaching as an example skill.

Posted in: Developmental robotics , Tagged: , ,

Learning basic motion skills through modeling them as parameterized modules (learned by demonstration and babbling), and a nice state of the art of the development of motion skills

July 26, 2017 08:51 ,

René Felix Reinhart, Autonomous exploration of motor skills by skill babbling, Auton Robot (2017) 41:1521–1537, DOI: 10.1007/s10514-016-9613-x.

Autonomous exploration of motor skills is a key capability of learning robotic systems. Learning motor skills can be formulated as inverse modeling problem, which targets at finding an inverse model that maps desired outcomes in some task space, e.g., via points of a motion, to appropriate actions, e.g., motion control policy parameters. In this paper, autonomous exploration of motor skills is achieved by incrementally learning inverse models starting from an initial demonstration. The algorithm is referred to as skill babbling, features sample-efficient learning, and scales to high-dimensional action spaces. Skill babbling extends ideas of goal-directed exploration, which organizes exploration in the space of goals. The proposed approach provides a modular framework for autonomous skill exploration by separating the learning of the inverse model from the exploration mechanism and a model of achievable targets, i.e. the workspace. The effectiveness of skill babbling is demonstrated for a range of motor tasks comprising the autonomous bootstrapping of inverse kinematics and parameterized motion primitives.

Posted in: Developmental robotics , Tagged: ,

Developmental approach for a robot manipulator that learns in several bootstrapped stages, strongly inspired in infant development

July 21, 2015 10:32 ,

Ugur, E.; Nagai, Y.; Sahin, E.; Oztop, E., Staged Development of Robot Skills: Behavior Formation, Affordance Learning and Imitation with Motionese, Autonomous Mental Development, IEEE Transactions on , vol.7, no.2, pp.119,139, June 2015, DOI: 10.1109/TAMD.2015.2426192.

Inspired by infant development, we propose a three staged developmental framework for an anthropomorphic robot manipulator. In the first stage, the robot is initialized with a basic reach-and- enclose-on-contact movement capability, and discovers a set of behavior primitives by exploring its movement parameter space. In the next stage, the robot exercises the discovered behaviors on different objects, and learns the caused effects; effectively building a library of affordances and associated predictors. Finally, in the third stage, the learned structures and predictors are used to bootstrap complex imitation and action learning with the help of a cooperative tutor. The main contribution of this paper is the realization of an integrated developmental system where the structures emerging from the sensorimotor experience of an interacting real robot are used as the sole building blocks of the subsequent stages that generate increasingly more complex cognitive capabilities. The proposed framework includes a number of common features with infant sensorimotor development. Furthermore, the findings obtained from the self-exploration and motionese guided human-robot interaction experiments allow us to reason about the underlying mechanisms of simple-to-complex sensorimotor skill progression in human infants.

Posted in: Developmental robotics, Psycho-physiological bases of engineering , Tagged: , , , , ,

Example of application of bayesian network learning and inference to robotics, and a brief but useful related work on learning by imitation

July 17, 2015 12:31 ,

Dan Song; Ek, C.H.; Huebner, K.; Kragic, D., Task-Based Robot Grasp Planning Using Probabilistic Inference, Robotics, IEEE Transactions on , vol.31, no.3, pp.546,561, June 2015, DOI: 10.1109/TRO.2015.2409912.

Grasping and manipulating everyday objects in a goal-directed manner is an important ability of a service robot. The robot needs to reason about task requirements and ground these in the sensorimotor information. Grasping and interaction with objects are challenging in real-world scenarios, where sensorimotor uncertainty is prevalent. This paper presents a probabilistic framework for the representation and modeling of robot-grasping tasks. The framework consists of Gaussian mixture models for generic data discretization, and discrete Bayesian networks for encoding the probabilistic relations among various task-relevant variables, including object and action features as well as task constraints. We evaluate the framework using a grasp database generated in a simulated environment including a human and two robot hand models. The generative modeling approach allows the prediction of grasping tasks given uncertain sensory data, as well as object and grasp selection in a task-oriented manner. Furthermore, the graphical model framework provides insights into dependencies between variables and features relevant for object grasping.

Posted in: Learning from Demonstration , Tagged: , , , , ,

Neurological evidences of the hierarchical arrangement of the process of motor skill learning

May 4, 2015 09:51 ,

Jörn Diedrichsen, Katja Kornysheva, Motor skill learning between selection and execution, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 19, Issue 4, April 2015, Pages 227-233, ISSN 1364-6613, DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2015.02.003.

Learning motor skills evolves from the effortful selection of single movement elements to their combined fast and accurate production. We review recent trends in the study of skill learning which suggest a hierarchical organization of the representations that underlie such expert performance, with premotor areas encoding short sequential movement elements (chunks) or particular component features (timing/spatial organization). This hierarchical representation allows the system to utilize elements of well-learned skills in a flexible manner. One neural correlate of skill development is the emergence of specialized neural circuits that can produce the required elements in a stable and invariant fashion. We discuss the challenges in detecting these changes with fMRI.

Posted in: Psycho-physiological bases of engineering , Tagged: ,