Robot Learning from Demonstration: Kinesthetic Teaching vs. Teleoperation

We are interested in developing learning from demonstration systems that are suitable to be used by everyday people. We compare two interaction methods, kinesthetic teaching and teleoperation, for the users to show successful demonstrations of a skill. In the former, the user physically guides the robot and in the latter the user controls the robot with a haptic device. We evaluate our results using skill dependent quantitative measures, timing information and survey questions. We find that kinesthetic teaching is faster in terms of giving a single demonstration and the demonstrations are more successful. However, the learned skill does not perform better as expected. The survey results show that users think kinesthetic teaching is easier and more accurate and an open-ended question suggests that people would prefer kinesthetic teaching over teleoperation for everyday skills.