Programming service tasks in household environments by human demonstration

Robot assistants will only reach a mass consumer market when they are easy to use. This applies especially to the way a user programs his robot system. The only approach that enables a non-expert robot user to teach a system complex tasks is programming by demonstration. This paper explains the basic concepts for mapping typical human actions performed in a household to a robot system: the recognition of the particular user actions, the task representation and the mapping strategy itself. The execution of a mapped program can then be performed on a real robot. An experiment is presented that was carried out concerning a table laying task and proving the feasibility of this approach.