Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Remote Robotic Laboratories for Learning from Demonstration

Enabling user interaction and shared experimentation

  • Published:
International Journal of Social Robotics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper documents the technology developed during the creation of the PR2 Remote Lab and the process of using it for shared development for Learning from Demonstration. Remote labs enable a larger and more diverse group of researchers to participate directly in state-of-the-art robotics research and will improve the reproducibility and comparability of robotics experiments. We present solutions to interface, control, and design difficulties in the client and server-side software when implementing a remote laboratory architecture. We describe how researchers can interact with the PR2 and its environment remotely through a web interface, as well as develop similar interfaces to visualize and run experiments remotely.

Additionally, we describe how the remote lab technology was used by researchers participating in the Robot Learning from Demonstration Challenge (LfD) held in conjunction with the AAAI-11 Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Teams from three institutions used the remote lab as their primary development and testing platform. This paper reviews the process as well as providing observations and lessons learned.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. http://www.ros.org/wiki/rosdoc_rosorg

  2. http://www.w3.org

  3. http://www.whatwg.org

  4. http://www.ros.org/wiki/mjpeg_server

  5. http://www.ros.org/wiki/interactive_markers

  6. http://www.ros.org/wiki/pr2_pick_and_place_demos

  7. http://bosch-ros-pkg.sourceforge.net/

  8. http://code.google.com/p/brown-ros-pkg/

References

  1. Abbeel P, Ng AY (2004) Apprenticeship learning via inverse reinforcement learning. In: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on machine learning

    Google Scholar 

  2. Aldridge H, Bluethmann W, Ambrose R, Diftler M (2000) Control architecture for the robonaut space humanoid. In: Proceedings humanoids 2000, the 1st IEEE/RAS conference on humanoid robots

    Google Scholar 

  3. Argall BD, Chernova S, Veloso M, Browning B (2009) A survey of robot learning from demonstration. Robot Auton Syst 57:469–483

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Atkeson CG, Schaal S (1997) Robot learning from demonstration. In: Fourteenth international conference on machine learning (ICML), Nashville, TN, pp 12–20

    Google Scholar 

  5. Billard A, Calinon S, Dillmann R, Schaal S (2008) Robot programming by demonstration. In: Handbook of robotics. Springer, Secaucus

    Google Scholar 

  6. Burgard W, Schulz D (2002) In: Robust visualization for online control of mobile robots. MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 241–258

    Google Scholar 

  7. Calinon S, Billard A (2007) Incremental learning of gestures by imitation in a humanoid robot. In: Second conference on human-robot interaction (HRI), Arlington, Virginia

    Google Scholar 

  8. Callaghan M, Harkin J, Prasad G, McGinnity T, Maguire L (2003) Integrated architecture for remote experimentation. In: IEEE international conference on systems, man and cybernetics, 2003, vol 5, pp 4822–4827

    Google Scholar 

  9. Casini M, Prattichizzo D, Vicino A (2004) The automatic control telelab: a web-based technology for distance learning. IEEE Control Syst Mag 24(3):36–44

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Casper JL, Murphy RR (2002) Workflow study on human-robot interaction in USAR. In: Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE international conference on robotics & automation, pp 1997–2003

    Google Scholar 

  11. Chernova S, Veloso M (2007) Confidence-based policy learning from demonstration using gaussian mixture models. In: International conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (AAMAS)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Chernova S, Orkin J, Brazeal C (2010) Crowdsourcing HRI through online multi-player games. In: Proceedings of the AAAI 2010 fall symposium on dialog with robots

    Google Scholar 

  13. Crick C, Jay G, Osentoski S, Pitzer B, Jenkins OC (2011) Rosbridge: Ros for non-ros users. In: Proceedings of the 15th international symposium on robotics research (ISRR)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Crick C, Osentoski S, Jay G, Jenkins OC (2011) Human and robot perception in large-scale learning from demonstration. In: 6th ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction

    Google Scholar 

  15. Dong S, Williams B (2010) Motion learning in variable environments using probabilistic flow tubes. In: 2011 IEEE international conference on robotics and automation (ICRA), pp 1976–1981

    Google Scholar 

  16. Ferrero A, Salicone S, Bonora C, Parmigiani M (2003) Remlab: a java-based remote, didactic measurement laboratory. IEEE Trans Instrum Meas 52(3):710–715

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Fu M, Yeo C, Lin Y, Wang F (2001) Waves: towards real time laboratory experiments in cyberspace. In: IEEE international conference on systems, man, and cybernetics, vol 5, pp 3470–3474

    Google Scholar 

  18. Goldberg K, Dreyfus H, Goldman A, Grau O, Gržinić M, Hannaford B, Idinopulos M, Jay M, Kac E, Kusahara M (2000) The robot in the garden: telerobotics and telepistemology in the age of the Internet. MIT Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  19. Grollman DH, Jenkins OC (2008) Sparse incremental learning for interactive robot control policy estimation. In: International conference on robotics and automation (ICRA)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Hayes J, Efros A (2008) Scene completion using millions of photographs. Commun ACM 51(10):87–94

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Khansari-Zadeh SM, Billard A (2011) Learning stable nonlinear dynamical systems with gaussian mixture models. IEEE Trans Robot 27(5):943–957

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Konidaris GD, Kuindersma SR, Barto AG, Grupen RA (2010) Constructing skill trees for reinforcement learning agents from demonstration trajectories. In: Advances in neural information processing systems 23 (NIPS 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Li L, Wang FY, Lai G, Wu F (2003) Online autonomous guidance system for remote experiments in control engineering. In: IEEE international conference on systems, man and cybernetics, vol 3, pp 2444–2449

    Google Scholar 

  24. Marín R, Sanz PJ, Del Pobil AP (2003) The uji online robot: an education and training experience. Auton Robots 15:283–297

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Marín R, Wirz R, Sanz P, Fernández J (2007) Internet-based tele-laboratory: remote experiments using the snrp distributed network architecture. In: Advances in telerobotics. Springer tracts in advanced robotics, vol 31. Springer, Berlin, pp 429–444

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  26. Meeussen W, Marder-Eppstein E, Watts K, Gerkey BP (2011) Long term autonomy in office environments. In: ICRA 2011 workshop on long-term autonomy. IEEE Press, Shanghai

    Google Scholar 

  27. Nicolescu M, Matarić MJ (2002) A hierarchical architecture for behavior-based robots. In: 1st international joint conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (AAMAS), pp 227–233

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  28. Nicolescu M, Matarić MJ (2003) Natural methods for robot task learning: instructive demonstration, generalization and practice. In: 2nd international joint conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (AAMAS), pp 241–248

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  29. Okamura A (2004) Methods for haptic feedback in teleoperated robot-assisted surgery. In: Industrial robotics, pp 499–508

    Google Scholar 

  30. Osentoski S, Jay G, Crick C, Pitzer B, DuHadway C, Jenkins OC (2011) Robots as web services: reproducible experimentation and application development using rosjs. In: Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE international conference on robotics & automation

    Google Scholar 

  31. Pastor P, Kalakrishnan M, Chitta S, Theodorou E, Schaal S (2011) Skill learning and task outcome prediction for manipulation. In: Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE international conference on robotics & automation (ICML 2011)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Pitzer B, Styer M, Bersch C, DuHadway C, Becker J (2011) Towards perceptual shared autonomy for robotic mobile manipulation. In: 2011 IEEE international conference on robotics and automation (ICRA 2011)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Quigley M, Conley K, Gerkey BP, Faust J, Foote T, Leibs J, Wheeler R, Ng AY (2009) Ros: an open-source robot operating system. In: ICRA workshop on open source software

    Google Scholar 

  34. Schulz D, Burgard W, Fox D, Thrun S, Cremers AB (2000) Web interfaces for mobile robots in public places. IEEE Robot Autom Mag 7:48–56

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Smart WD, Kaelbling LP (2002) Effective reinforcement learning for mobile robots. In: 2002 IEEE international conference on robotics and automation (ICRA), pp 3404–3410

    Google Scholar 

  36. Talukdar PP, Jacob M, Mehmood MS, Crammer K, Ives ZG, Pereira F, Guha S (2008) Learning to create data-integrating queries. In: Proceedings of the twenty-second international conference on computational linguistics, pp 737–744

    Google Scholar 

  37. Taylor K, Trevelyan J (1995) A telerobot on the world wide web. In: National conference of the Australian robot association

    Google Scholar 

  38. Trevelyan J (2004) Lessons learned from 10 years experience with remote laboratories. In: International conference on engineering education and research progress “Through partnership”

    Google Scholar 

  39. Willow Garage: Personal Robot 2 (PR2). http://www.willowgarage.com

  40. Ziebart BD, Maas A, Bagnell JD, Dey AK (2008) Maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning. In: Proceedings of the twenty-third AAAI conference on artificial intelligence

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bosch Research and Technology Center, 4005 Miranda Ave, Palo Alto, CA, 94304, USA

    Sarah Osentoski & Benjamin Pitzer

  2. Brown University, Box 1910, 115 Waterman St, Providence, RI, 02912, USA

    Christopher Crick, Graylin Jay & Odest Chadwicke Jenkins

  3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 362 Memorial Dr. W7-203, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Shuonan Dong

  4. EPFL, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, EPFL-STI-I2S-LASA, Station 9, 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Daniel Grollman

  5. Worcester Polytechnic Institute, 100 Institute Dr., 125 Atwater Kent Labs, Worcester, MA, 01609, USA

    Halit Bener Suay

Authors
  1. Sarah Osentoski
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Benjamin Pitzer
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Christopher Crick
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Graylin Jay
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Shuonan Dong
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Daniel Grollman
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  7. Halit Bener Suay
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  8. Odest Chadwicke Jenkins
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sarah Osentoski.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Osentoski, S., Pitzer, B., Crick, C. et al. Remote Robotic Laboratories for Learning from Demonstration. Int J of Soc Robotics 4, 449–461 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-012-0157-8

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-012-0157-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation