Robot programming by demonstration using teleoperation through imitation

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to present a new learning from demonstration-based trajectory planner that generalizes and extracts relevant features of the desired motion for an industrial robot. Design/methodology/approach The proposed trajectory planner is based on the concept of human arm motion imitation by the robot end-effector. The teleoperation-based real-time control architecture is used for direct and effective imitation learning. Using this architecture, a self-sufficient trajectory planner is designed which has inbuilt mapping strategy and direct learning ability. The proposed approach is also compared with the conventional robot programming approach. Findings The developed planner was implemented on the 5 degrees-of-freedom industrial robot SCORBOT ER-4u for an object manipulation task. The experimental results revealed that despite morphological differences, the robot imitated the demonstrated trajectory with more than 90 per cent geometric similarity and 60 per cent of the demonstrations were successfully learned by the robot with good positioning accuracy. The proposed planner shows an upper hand over the existing approach in robustness and operational ease. Research limitations/implications The approach assumes that the human demonstrator has the requisite expertise of the task demonstration and robot teleoperation. Moreover, the kinematic capabilities and the workspace conditions of the robot are known a priori. Practical implications The real-time implementation of the proposed methodology is possible and can be successfully used for industrial automation with very little knowledge of robot programming. The proposed approach reduces the complexities involved in robot programming by direct learning of the task from the demonstration given by the teacher. Originality/value This paper discusses a new framework blended with teleoperation and kinematic considerations of the Cartesian space, as well joint space of human and industrial robot and optimization for the robot programming by demonstration.