Reproduction of Human Demonstrations with a Soft-Robotic Arm based on a Library of Learned Probabilistic Movement Primitives

In this paper we introduce a novel technique that aims to control a two-module bio-inspired soft-robotic arm in order to qualitatively reproduce human demonstrations. The main idea behind the proposed methodology is based on the assumption that a complex trajectory can be derived from the composition and asynchronous activation of learned parameterizable simple movements constituting a knowledge base. The present work capitalises on recent research progress in Movement Primitive (MP) theory in order to initially build a library of Probabilistic MPs (ProMPs), and subsequently to compute on the fly their proper combination in the task space resulting in the requested trajectory. At the same time, a model learning method is assigned with the task to approximate the inverse kinematics, while a replanning procedure handles the sequential and/or parallel ProMPs' asynchronous activation. Taking advantage of the mapping at the primitive-level that the ProMP framework provides, the composition is transferred into the actuation space for execution. The proposed control architecture is experimentally evaluated on a real soft-robotic arm, where its capability to simplify the trajectory control task for robots of complex unmodeled dynamics is exhibited.