  Enabling robots to effectively imitate expert skills in longhorizon tasks
such as locomotion, manipulation, and more, poses a long-standing challenge.
Existing imitation learning (IL) approaches for robots still grapple with
sub-optimal performance in complex tasks. In this paper, we consider how this
challenge can be addressed within the human cognitive priors. Heuristically, we
extend the usual notion of action to a dual Cognition (high-level)-Action
(low-level) architecture by introducing intuitive human cognitive priors, and
propose a novel skill IL framework through human-robot interaction, called
Cognition-Action-based Skill Imitation Learning (CasIL), for the robotic agent
to effectively cognize and imitate the critical skills from raw visual
demonstrations. CasIL enables both cognition and action imitation, while
high-level skill cognition explicitly guides low-level primitive actions,
providing robustness and reliability to the entire skill IL process. We
evaluated our method on MuJoCo and RLBench benchmarks, as well as on the
obstacle avoidance and point-goal navigation tasks for quadrupedal robot
locomotion. Experimental results show that our CasIL consistently achieves
competitive and robust skill imitation capability compared to other
counterparts in a variety of long-horizon robotic tasks.
