Learning movement primitives for force interaction tasks

Kinesthetic teaching is a promising approach to acquire robot skills in an intuitive way. This paper focuses on learning skills that do not solely rely on kinematics but also need to take into account interaction forces. We present three novel concepts towards learning such force interaction skills. Firstly, we determine segments from a small number of continuous kinesthetic demonstrations using contact information. Secondly, we associate each segment with a movement primitive, and determine its composition, i.e., the control variables and reference frames that allow to reproduce the demonstrated task. Lastly, we propose a concept to determine the transitions between the primitives during reproduction. The proposed methods are evaluated on a box pulling and flipping task, and show very good generalization abilities for objects with different geometries, and situations with different object arrangements.