Teaching by demonstration of assembly motion in VR - non-deterministic search-type motion in the teaching stage

"Teaching by Demonstration" is a method of generating a robot program that makes a robot do the same task as the task that a human operator demonstrates. We have developed a "teaching by demonstration in VR" system that automatically generates a robot program to work in the red world after a task is demonstrated by an operator in the virtual world. This system generates a program that detects each contact state extracted from demonstration in VR and produces it by skillful motion primitives. We find that some types of motion that are included in the recorded motion given by a human operator in the VR in teaching stage cannot be realized in the execution stage if the robot tries to do the same task by using the human demonstration data even on a contact state level. In this paper, based an our observation that a human has the skill wherein contact state transitions are made non-deterministically, we propose a method of dealing with one of the important non-deterministic motions, "non-deterministic search type motion" Experimental results show the feasibility of the method.