Extracting manipulation skills from observation

The completion of robot programs requires a long development time and much effort. To shorten this programming time and to minimize the effort, we have been developing a system which we refer to as the "Assembly Plan from Observation (APO) system". This system provides the ability for a robot to observe a human performing an assembly task, to recognize the task and to then generate a program to perform that same task. One of the necessary tasks in APO is to create the trajectory of a robot hand movement after having observed a human's performance. The previous system developed a direct observation method based on the trajectory of a human's movement. Although it was simple and handy, the system was susceptible to noise. This paper proposes a method to make the observation robust against noise by analyzing topological contact relations. The system divides the trajectory into small segments based on this contact analysis, and then allocates an operation element, referred to as a "sub-skill", to those segments. The result is a robust, trajectory-based APO system.