Programming-by-Demonstration of reaching motions—A next-state-planner approach

This paper presents a novel approach to skill acquisition from human demonstration. A robot manipulator with a morphology which is very different from the human arm simply cannot copy a human motion, but has to execute its own version of the skill. When a skill once has been acquired the robot must also be able to generalize to other similar skills, without a new learning process. By using a motion planner that operates in an object-related world frame called hand-state, we show that this representation simplifies skill reconstruction and preserves the essential parts of the skill.