Robot control for tactile feedback based manip-ulation can be difficult due to modeling of physical contacts, partial observability of the environment, and noise in perception and control. This work focuses on solving partial observability of contact-rich manipulation tasks as a Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) Imitation Learning (IL) problem. The proposed Seq2Seq model first produces a robot-environment interaction sequence to estimate the partially observable environment state variables, and then, the observed interaction sequence is transformed to a control sequence for the task itself. The proposed Seq2Seq IL for tactile feedback based manipulation is experimentally validated on a door-open task in a simulated environment and a snap-on insertion task with a real robot. The model is able to learn both tasks from only 50 expert demonstrations while state-of-the-art reinforcement learning and imitation learning methods fail.

Simulation to real (Sim-to-Real) is an attractive approach to construct controllers for robotic tasks that are easier to simulate than to analytically solve. Working Sim-to-Real solutions have been demonstrated for tasks with a clear single objective such as "reach the target". Real world applications, however, often consist of multiple simultaneous objectives such as "reach the target" but "avoid obstacles". A straightforward solution in the context of reinforcement learning (RL) is to combine multiple objectives into a multi-term reward function and train a single monolithic controller. Recently, a hybrid solution based on pre-trained single objective controllers and a switching rule between them was proposed. In this work, we compare these two approaches in the multi-objective setting of a robot manipulator to reach a target while avoiding an obstacle. Our findings show that the training of a hybrid controller is easier and obtains a better success-failure trade-off than a monolithic controller. The controllers trained in simulator were verified by a real set-up.

The modelling of cognition is playing a major role in robotics. Indeed, robots need to learn, adapt and plan their actions in order to interact with their environment. To do so, approaches like embodiment and enactivism propose to ground sensorimotor experience in the robot's body to shape the development of cognition. In this work, we focus on the role of memory during learning in a closed loop. As sensorimotor contingencies, we consider a robot arm that moves a baby mobile toy to get visual reward. First, the robot explores the continuous sensorimotor space by associating visual stimuli to motor actions through motor babbling. After exploration, the robot uses the experience from its memory and exploits it, thus optimizing its motion to perceive more visual stimuli. The proposed approach uses Dynamic Field Theory and is integrated in the GummiArm, a 3D printed humanoid robot arm. The results indicate a higher visual neural activation after motion learning and show the benefits of an embodied babbling strategy.

Robotic systems developed for support can provide assistance in various ways. However, regardless of the service provided, the quality of user interaction is key to adoption by the general public. Simple communication difficulties, such as terminological differences, can make or break the acceptance of robots. In this work we take into account these difficulties in communication between a human and a robot. We propose a system that allows to handle unknown concepts through symbol manipulation based on natural language interactions. In addition, ontologies are used as a convenient way to store the knowledge and reason about it. To demonstrate the use of our system, two scenarios are described and tested with a Care-O-Bot 4. The experiments show that confusions and difficulties in communication can effectively be resolved through symbol manipulation.