Publication
Learning concurrent motor skills in versatile solution spaces
Christian Daniel; Gerhard Neumann; Jan Peters
In: 2012 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS-2012), October 7-12, Portugal, Pages 3591-3597, IEEE, 2012.
Abstract
Future robots need to autonomously acquire motor skills in order to reduce their reliance on human programming. Many motor skill learning methods concentrate on learning a single solution for a given task. However, discarding information about additional solutions during learning unnecessarily limits autonomy. Such favoring of single solutions often requires re-learning of motor skills when the task, the environment or the robot's body changes in a way that renders the learned solution infeasible. Future robots need to be able to adapt to such changes and, ideally, have a large repertoire of movements to cope with such problems. In contrast to current methods, our approach simultaneously learns multiple distinct solutions for the same task, such that a partial degeneration of this solution space does not prevent the successful completion of the task. In this paper, we present a complete framework that is capable of learning different solution strategies for a real robot Tetherball task.