A geometric approach to task understanding and playback: compact and robust task description for complex environments

The ability to execute similar tasks in various environments is important for robot systems, but there are few approaches for doing this. We recently proposed a "teaching by showing" system that recognizes teaching tasks and executes corresponding tasks in different environments. The teaching task is recognized from geometrical constraint and translated into a general task description (GTD). However, this method is difficult to apply in complex environments because of redundancy an description and lack of generalization. This paper presents an algorithm for both two- and three-dimensional environments that solves these problems. The improved GTD describes tasks in complex environments very compactly. It ignores objects that do not affect the task, which adds a useful robustness to the system.<>