Teaching of assembly motion by demonstration-artificial constrained motion primitives and its implementation using virtual polyhedron

Teaching by demonstration is a method to generate a robot program that makes a robot do the same task as the task which a human operator demonstrates. The author developed a teaching by demonstration in VR system which automatically generates a robot program to work in the real world after a task is demonstrated by an operator in the virtual world. This system deals with a task of controlling contact states between bodies like the assembly task. When one body is not in contact with another, not only contact states but also other new states which can specify more general arrangement of the bodies are necessary in order to make the robot more skilful. The author introduced a virtual smallface (VSF) and an artificial constrained motion primitive (ACMP) for this purpose. A virtual polyhedron for constrained motion (VPCM) is newly introduced in order to implement more general ACMPs. An operator more easily and generally defines new states of the task by using VSFs and VPCMs, since VSFs are used to define intuitively new states of a task and since (virtual) contact states between VPCMs are also used as the new states