Reproduction of roller painting operations by humanoid robot for observational learning

Abstract

The aging population reduces the availability of skilled workers in various industries, such as construction. To handle this problem, unskilled workers can be trained. Among training methods, learning from demonstration allows to acquire motor skills. However, expert trainers are unavailable to perform demonstrations at any time. Hence, we aim to use a humanoid robot as a demonstrator and consider roller painting as the target construction task. We propose a method for the robot to reproduce roller painting operations based on human demonstration. The roller pose and contact wrench are measured from the demonstration using a marker-less method. The measurements combined with compliance control allow to control the robot to reproduce the demonstration. During reproduction, the robot adjusts the stiffness using compliance control. A comparison between the reproduced and original operations shows that the robot achieves comparable performance to the human demonstrator in roller painting.