Teaching and learning of robot tasks via observation of human performance

Within this paper, an approach for teaching a humanoid robot is presented that will enable the robot to learn typical tasks required in everyday household environments. Our approach, called Programming by Demonstration, which is implemented and successfully used in our institute to teach a robot system is presented. Firstly, we concentrate on an analysis of human actions and action sequences that can be identified when watching a human demonstrator. Secondly, sensor aid systems are introduced which augment the robot’s perception capabilities while watching a human’s demonstration and the robot’s execution of tasks respectively. The main focus is then layed on the knowledge representation in order to be able to abstract the problem solution strategies and to transfer them onto the robot system. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.