Learning symbolic representations of actions from human demonstrations

Abstract

In this paper, a robot learning approach is pro- posed which integrates Visuospatial Skill Learning, Imitation Learning, and conventional planning methods. In our approach, the sensorimotor skills (i.e., actions) are learned through a learning from demonstration strategy. The sequence of per- formed actions is learned through demonstrations using Visu- ospatial Skill Learning. A standard action-level planner is used to represent a symbolic description of the skill, which allows the system to represent the skill in a discrete, symbolic form. The Visuospatial Skill Learning module identifies the underlying constraints of the task and extracts symbolic predicates (i.e., action preconditions and effects), thereby updating the planner representation while the skills are being learned. Therefore the planner maintains a generalized representation of each skill as a reusable action, which can be planned and performed inde- pendently during the learning phase. Preliminary experimental results on the iCub robot are presented.