Publication

Dimensionality reduction in learning Gaussian mixture models of movement primitives for contextualized action selection and adaptation

Journal Article (2018)

Journal

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

Pages

3922-3929

Volume

3

Number

4

Doc link

https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2018.2857921

File

Download the digital copy of the doc pdf document

Abstract

Robotic manipulation often requires adaptation to changing environments. Such changes can be represented by a certain number of contextual variables that may be observed or sensed in different manners. When learning and representing robot motion –usually with movement primitives–, it is desirable to adapt the learned behaviors to the current context. Moreover, different actions or motions can be considered in the same framework, using contextualization to decide which action applies to which situation. Such frameworks, however, may easily become large-dimensional, thus requiring to reduce the dimensionality of the parameters space, as well as the amount of data needed to generate and improve the model over experience.


In this paper, we propose an approach to obtain a generative model from a set of actions that share a common feature. Such feature, namely a contextual variable, is plugged into the model to generate motion. We encode the data with a Gaussian Mixture Model in the parameter space of Probabilistic Movement Primitives (ProMPs), after performing Dimensionality Reduction (DR) on such parameter space. We append the contextual variable to the parameter space and obtain the number of Gaussian components, i.e., different actions in a dataset, through Persistent Homology.


Then, using multimodal Gaussian Mixture Regression (GMR), we can retrieve the most likely actions given a contextual situation and execute them. After actions are executed, we use Reward-Weighted Responsibility GMM (RWR-GMM) update the model after each execution. Experimentation in 3 scenarios shows that the method drastically reduces the dimensionality of the parameter space, thus implementing both action selection and adaptation to a changing situation in an efficient way.

Categories

intelligent robots, learning (artificial intelligence), robots.

Scientific reference

A. Colomé and C. Torras. Dimensionality reduction in learning Gaussian mixture models of movement primitives for contextualized action selection and adaptation. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 3(4): 3922-3929, 2018.