Learning predictive models of a depth camera & manipulator from raw execution traces

In this paper, we attack the problem of learning a predictive model of a depth camera and manipulator directly from raw execution traces. While the problem of learning manipulator models from visual and proprioceptive data has been addressed before, existing techniques often rely on assumptions about the structure of the robot or tracked features in observation space. We make no such assumptions. Instead, we formulate the problem as that of learning a high-dimensional controlled stochastic process. We leverage recent work on nonparametric predictive state representations to learn a generative model of the depth camera and robotic arm from sequences of uninterpreted actions and observations. We perform several experiments in which we demonstrate that our learned model can accurately predict future depth camera observations in response to sequences of motor commands.