Demonstration-Guided Motion Planning

We present demonstration-guided motion planning (DGMP), a new framework for planning motions for personal robots to perform household tasks. DGMP combines the strengths of sampling-based motion planning and robot learning from demonstrations to generate plans that (1) avoid novel obstacles in cluttered environments, and (2) learn and maintain critical aspects of the motion required to successfully accomplish a task. Sampling-based motion planning methods are highly effective at computing paths from start to goal configurations that avoid obstacles, but task constraints (e.g. a glass of water must be held upright to avoid a spill) must be explicitly enumerated and programmed. Instead, we use a set of expert demonstrations and automatically extract time-dependent task constraints by learning low variance aspects of the demonstrations, which are correlated with the task constraints. We then introduce multi-component rapidly-exploring roadmaps (MCRRM), a sampling-based method that incrementally computes a motion plan that avoids obstacles and optimizes a learned cost metric. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DGMP using the Aldebaran Nao robot performing household tasks in a cluttered environment, including moving a spoon full of sugar from a bowl to a cup and cleaning the surface of a table.