Learning of controller behaviour within the control basis framework

Within this project we investigate the development of motor skills by explorative learning based on the control basis framework of Grupen et al, which allows a flexible combination of simple control units to achieve complex control tasks. One major aspect of the proposed project will be the basic implementation of the control basis framework within the 2-Arm Manipulation-Setup and for the Barthoc torsos. This includes to choose the right set of elementary controller units, and to investigate the resulting behavior if they are combined in various ways. Another aspect will be to develop coordination mechanisms required to execute and monitor several primitives in sequence or in parallel. Here the question arises how to prioritize several conflicting behaviors that operate in parallel. Which mechanisms are needed to dynamically weight primitives depending on situational context, perceptual confidence of different sensor modalities, and user-specified task priority? If elementary controllers are combined in a hierarchical manner, how can their resource requirements be automatically propagated through this hierarchy to provide a foundation for scheduling? Finally, the most challenging aspect is the development of learning methods, which allow the robot to acquire basic motor behavior from scratch by exploration, eventually primed from visually or otherwise observed trajectories. Especially interesting in this context are of course manipulative movements, e.g. pushing an object with a single finger or regrasping an object in order to improve the grasp quality or to realize a desired object orientation w.r.t. the hand.[view:groupmembers==204]