Robot Learns To Flip Pancakes, Iron Clothes

Writing by Evan Ackerman on Friday, 23 of July , 2010 at 12:19 am

Once again, it’s robots and pancakes. Not that I have a problem with that, except for the fact that it makes me want pancakes and I don’t have pancakes. This robot arm has been taught to flip a rather strange looking pancake (a pancake modified with vision tracking markers) through kinesthetic teaching, where a human demonstrates the basic movement sequence, and then the robot gradually learns how to move itself to duplicate the essentials of that sequence. For the flip, the robot figures out that the initial throwing motion requires a stiff arm, while the catching motion requires a more compliant arm.

This behavior has been programmed by Sylvain Calinon and Dr. Petar Kormushev. Watch a robot arm learning how to iron, after the jump.

For the example of the ironing task, the system learns that it is more important to track the movement in the vertical direction than in the other two directions of the horizontal plane. The video then shows how to exploit this redundancy of the task to satisfy other constraints in parallel, such as moving away from the user to prevent collision.

[ Programming By Demonstration ] VIA [ Robots.net ]

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Category: Research

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