Learning one-shot imitation from humans without humans
File(s)1911.01103.pdf (4.26 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Bonardi, Alessandro
James, Stephen
Davison, Andrew J
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Humans can naturally learn to execute a new task by seeing it performed by other individuals once, and then reproduce it in a variety of configurations. Endowing robots with this ability of imitating humans from third person is a very immediate and natural way of teaching new tasks. Only recently, through meta-learning, there have been successful attempts to one-shot imitation learning from humans; however, these approaches require a lot of human resources to collect the data in the real world to train the robot. But is there a way to remove the need for real world human demonstrations during training? We show that with Task-Embedded Control Networks, we can infer control polices by embedding human demonstrations that can condition a control policy and achieve one-shot imitation learning. Importantly, we do not use a real human arm to supply demonstrations during training, but instead leverage domain randomisation in an application that has not been seen before: sim-to-real transfer on humans. Upon evaluating our approach on pushing and placing tasks in both simulation and in the real world, we show that in comparison to a system that was trained on real-world data we are able to achieve similar results by utilising only simulation data. Videos can be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/tecnets-humans .
Date Issued
2020-04
Date Acceptance
2020-02-06
Citation
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2020, 5 (2), pp.3533-3539
ISSN
2377-3766
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
3533
End Page
3539
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Volume
5
Issue
2
Copyright Statement
© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Sponsor
Dyson Technology Limited
Dyson Technology Limited
Identifier
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9020095
Grant Number
PO 4500501004
PO4500503359
Subjects
0913 Mechanical Engineering
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2020-03-02