Programming by demonstration (PbD) is an effective technique for developing complex robot manipulation tasks, such as opening bottles or using human tools. In order for such tasks to generalize to new scenes, the robot needs to be able to perceive objects, object parts, or other task-relevant parts of the scene. Previous work has relied on rigid, taskspecific perception systems for this purpose...

The full deployment of service robots in daily activities will require the robot to adapt to the needs of non-expert users, particularly, to learn how to perform new tasks from “natural” interactions. Reinforcement learning has been widely used in robotics, however, traditional algorithms require long training times, and may have problems with continuous spaces. Programming by demonstration has...

Motion imitation requires reproduction of a dynamical signature of a movement, i.e. a robot should be able to encode and reproduce a particular path together with a specific velocity and/or an acceleration profile. Furthermore, a human provides only few demonstrations, that cannot cover all possible contexts in which the robot will need to reproduce the motion autonomously. Therefore, the encod...

The thermal properties of cis-1,4-polybutadiene (cis-PBD) were investigated in dependence of content of cis units and of linearity of the main chain. cis-PBD grades containing a fraction of cis-segments ranging from 93 to 98 %, and with linear or branched chains, were analyzed. Upon isothermal crystallization from the melt at -26 °C for 1 h, followed by cooling to below the glass transition tem...

Programming‐by‐demonstration (PbD) is the possibility to program a robot just by showing what it is supposed to do and how it should do it. This paper reports a collection of developments that enable users to program industrial robots using speech, several device interfaces, force control and code generation techniques. The reported system is explained in detail and a few practical examples are...

In this paper, we look at resolvable balanced incomplete block designs on v points having blocks of size 4, briefly (v, 4, 1) RBIBDs. The problem we investigate is the existence of (v, 4, 1) RBIBDs containing a (w, 4, 1) RBIBD as a subdesign. We also require that each parallel class of the subdesign should be in a single parallel class of the containing design. Removing the subdesign gives an i...

This paper shows the relationship between EMG signals and human arm stiffness, measured in 3-D space. Preliminary results demonstrate the viability of this approach, which can then be used to measure human arm impedance from EMG only. Understanding human stiffness during interaction tasks will allow the development of an appropriate skill transfer exercise for Programming-by-Demonstration. Maki...

Pursuit is a desktop interface designed to enable non-programmers to construct programs that automate routine repetitive tasks in a way that is consistent with the direct manipulation paradigm. Pursuit combines a Programming by Demonstration (PBD) interface with an editable, visual program representation language. The representation language differs from existing visual languages because it exp...

The improvements originated from the end users of an application lead to a better adaptation of the user specific needs. We propose to use the programming by demonstration and the parametric modeling techniques to permit an end user to define new classes. To integrate this new classes in the system interface dynamically, dialogue specific tools are used. These tools are obtained by the reificat...

In this paper we describe preliminary results on the impact of providing different types of robot feedback on the effectiveness of teaching by demonstration, as well as on user satisfaction. Participants had to teach a humanoid robot various ways of holding a can, via tactile feedback, by providing several rounds of demonstration. Our goal was to determine the best way of providing feedback in ...