Robotics Researcher Petar Kormushev has posted a video of a Japanese robot learning to clean a whiteboard. Using “Upper-Body Kinesthetic Teaching,” the robot is guided through a number of whiteboard cleaning strategems (such as “spiral trajectory.”) Kormushev has previously taught robots to flip pancakes and, less domestically, to use a bow an arrow.
The video shows a Japanese humanoid robot (Fujitsu HOAP-2) learning a surface cleaning task by imitation learning. The presented approach allows a free-standing, self-balancing humanoid robot to acquire new motor skills by kinesthetic teaching. The method controls simultaneously the upper and lower body of the robot with different control strategies. Imitation learning is used for training the upper body via kinesthetic teaching, while at the same time ankle/hip reaction motion patterns are used for keeping the balance of the robot. During demonstration, a force/torque sensor is used to record the exerted forces, and during reproduction, a hybrid position/force controller is used to reproduce the learned trajectories in terms of positions and forces to the end effector.
– Teaching A Robot How To Flip Pancakes