Knowledge-Driven Robot Program Synthesis from Human VR Demonstrations

Abstract: Aging societies, labor shortages and increasing wage costs call for assistance robots capable of autonomously performing a wide array of real-world tasks. Such open-ended robotic manipulation requires not only powerful knowledge representations and reasoning (KR&R) algorithms, but also methods for humans to instruct robots what tasks to perform and how to perform them. In this paper, we present a system for automatically generating executable robot control programs from human task demonstrations in virtual reality (VR). We leverage common-sense knowledge and game engine-based physics to semantically interpret human VR demonstrations, as well as an expressive and general task representation and automatic path planning and code generation, embedded into a state-of-the-art cognitive architecture. We demonstrate our approach in the context of force-sensitive fetch-and-place for a robotic shopping assistant. The source code is available at https://github.com/ease-crc/vr-program-synthesis.