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Haptic Intelligence Autonomous Learning Empirical Inference Miscellaneous 2022

A Sequential Group VAE for Robot Learning of Haptic Representations

Haptic representation learning is a difficult task in robotics because information can be gathered only by actively exploring the environment over time, and because different actions elicit different object properties. We propose a Sequential Group VAE that leverages object persistence to learn and update latent general representations of multimodal haptic data. As a robot performs sequences of exploratory procedures on an object, the model accumulates data and learns to distinguish between general object properties, such as size and mass, and trial-to-trial variations, such as initial object position. We demonstrate that after very few observations, the general latent representations are sufficiently refined to accurately encode many haptic object properties.

Haptic Intelligence
Haptic Intelligence
Director
Empirical Inference, Autonomous Learning
Senior Research Scientist
Author(s): Benjamin A. Richardson and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker and Georg Martius
Pages: 1--11
Year: 2022
Month: December
BibTeX Type: Miscellaneous (misc)
Address: Auckland, New Zealand
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive
How Published: Workshop paper (8 pages) presented at the CoRL Workshop on Aligning Robot Representations with Humans
State: Published
URL: https://aligning-robot-human-representations.github.io/docs/camready_11.pdf

BibTeX

@misc{Richardson22-CORLWS-Sequential,
  title = {A Sequential Group {VAE} for Robot Learning of Haptic Representations},
  abstract = {Haptic representation learning is a difficult task in robotics because information can be gathered only by actively exploring the environment over time, and because different actions elicit different object properties. We propose a Sequential Group VAE that leverages object persistence to learn and update latent general representations of multimodal haptic data. As a robot performs sequences of exploratory procedures on an object, the model accumulates data and learns to distinguish between general object properties, such as size and mass, and trial-to-trial variations, such as initial object position. We demonstrate that after very few observations, the general latent representations are sufficiently refined to accurately encode many haptic object properties.},
  pages = {1--11},
  howpublished = {Workshop paper (8 pages) presented at the CoRL Workshop on Aligning Robot Representations with Humans},
  address = {Auckland, New Zealand},
  month = dec,
  year = {2022},
  author = {Richardson, Benjamin A. and Kuchenbecker, Katherine J. and Martius, Georg},
  url = {https://aligning-robot-human-representations.github.io/docs/camready_11.pdf},
  month_numeric = {12}
}