Discovering relevant task spaces using inverse feedback control

Learning complex skills by repeating and generalizing expert behavior is a fundamental problem in robotics. However, the usual approaches do not answer the question of what are appropriate representations to generate motion for a specific task. Since it is time-consuming for a human expert to manually design the motion control representation for a task, we propose to uncover such structure from data – observed motion trajectories. Inspired by Inverse Optimal Control, we present a novel method to learn a latent value function, imitate and generalize demonstrated behavior, and discover a task relevant motion representation. We test our method, called Task Space Retrieval Using Inverse Feedback Control (TRIC), on several challenging highdimensional tasks. TRIC learns the important control dimensions for the tasks from a few example movements and is able to robustly generalize to new situations.