Learning Reactive Motion Policies in Multiple Task Spaces from Human Demonstrations

Complex manipulation tasks often require non-trivial and coordinated movements of different parts of a robot. In this work, we address the challenges associated with learning and reproducing the skills required to execute such complex tasks. Specifically, we decompose a task into multiple subtasks and learn to reproduce the subtasks by learning stable policies from demonstrations. By leveraging the RMPflow framework for motion generation, our approach finds a stable global policy in the configuration space that enables simultaneous execution of various learned subtasks. The resulting global policy is a weighted combination of the learned policies such that the motions are coordinated and feasible under the robot’s kinematic and environmental constraints. We demonstrate the necessity and efficacy of the proposed approach in the context of multiple constrained manipulation tasks performed by a Franka Emika robot.