Learning articulated motions from visual demonstration

Abstract

Robots operating autonomously in household environments must be capable of interacting with articulated objects on a daily basis. They should be able to infer each object's underlying kinematic linkages purely by observing its motion during manipulation. This work proposes a framework that enables robots to learn the articulation in objects from user-provided demonstrations, using RGB-D sensors. We introduce algorithms that combine concepts in sparse feature tracking, motion segmentation, object pose estimation, and articulation learning, to develop our proposed framework. Additionally, our methods can predict the motion of previously seen articulated objects in future encounters. We present experiments that demonstrate the ability of our method, given RGB-D data, to identify, analyze and predict the articulation of a number of everyday objects within a human-occupied environment.