Email:
sylvain.calinon_at_epfl.ch

Room:
ME A3 393

Phones:

• Office: +39 0107 1781 755
• Mobile: +39 333 611 03 74
• Fax: +41 21 693 78 50

• Programming by Demonstration (PbD)
• Learning by Imitation
• Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)
• Machine Learning
• Humanoid Robots
  
  

  Robot Programming by Demonstration (PbD) covers methods by which a robot learns new skills through human guidance. Also referred to as learning by imitation or apprenticeship learning, PbD takes inspiration from the way humans learn new skills by imitation to develop methods by which new skills can be transmitted to a robot.

  
  

  PbD covers a broad range of applications. In industrial robotics, the goal is to reduce the time and costs required to program the robot. The rationale is that PbD would allow to modify an existing product, create several versions of a similar product or assemble new products in a very rapid way without using a teach pendant or a computer language. This could then be done by lay users without help from an expert in robotics.

  
  

  PbD is perceived as particularly useful to service robots, i.e. robots deemed to work in direct collaboration with humans. In this case, methods for PbD go beyond transferring skills and offer new ways for the robot to interact with the human, from being capable of recognizing people's motion to predicting their intention and seconding them in the accomplishment of complex tasks. As the technology improved to provide these robots with more and more complex hardware, including multiple sensor modalities and numerous degrees of freedom, robot control and especially robot learning became more and more complex too.

  
  

  Learning control strategies for numerous degrees of freedom platforms deemed to interact in complex and variable environments, such as households is faced with two key challenges: first, the complexity of the tasks to be learned is such that pure trial and error learning would be too slow. PbD appears thus a good approach to speed up learning by reducing the search space, while still allowing the robot to refine its model of the demonstration through trial and error. Second, there should be a continuum between learning and control, so that control strategies can adapt on the fly to drastic changes in the environment. The present work addresses both challenges in investigating methods by which PbD is used to learn the dynamics of robot's motion, and, by so doing, provide the robot with a generic and adaptive model of control.

  
  

• Robot Programming by Demonstration:
  
  • Determining task constraints
• Tools for Human-Robot Interaction:
  
  • Learning of social pointers
• Entertainment:
  
  • Portrait drawing robot
• PDA Interface for Humanoid Robots:
  
  • Imitation game and language acquisition

Journal Papers

2008

Dynamical System Modulation for Robot Learning via Kinesthetic Demonstrations
M. Hersch, F. Guenter, S. Calinon and A. Billard
IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 24 (2008) 1463–1467. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

2007

Reinforcement Learning for Imitating Constrained Reaching Movements
F. Guenter, M. Hersch, S. Calinon and A. Billard
RSJ Advanced Robotics, Special Issue on Imitative Robots, 21 (2007) 1521-1544. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

What is the Teacher's Role in Robot Programming by Demonstration? - Toward Benchmarks for Improved Learning
S. Calinon and A. Billard
Interaction Studies. Special Issue on Psychological Benchmarks in Human-Robot Interaction, 8 (2007). [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

On Learning, Representing and Generalizing a Task in a Humanoid Robot
S. Calinon, F. Guenter and A. Billard
IEEE transactions on systems, man and cybernetics, Part B. Special issue on robot learning by observation, demonstration and imitation, 37 (2007) 286-298. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

2006

Discriminative and Adaptive Imitation in Uni-Manual and Bi-Manual Tasks
A. Billard, S. Calinon and F. Guenter
Robotics and Autonomous Systems, 54 (2006) 370-384. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

2004

Discovering Optimal Imitation Strategies
A. Billard, Y. Epars, S. Calinon, G. Cheng and S. Schaal
robotics and autonomous systems, Special Issue: Robot Learning from Demonstration, 47 (2004) 69-77. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

Conference Papers

Pending

Teaching Physical Collaborative Tasks: Object-Lifting Case Study with a Humanoid
P. Evrard, E. Gribovskaya, S. Calinon, A. Billard and A. Kheddar
Proceedings of 9th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, (2009). [Detailed Record]

Teaching a Humanoid: A User Study with Hoap3 on Learning by Demonstration
A. Weiss, J. Igelsboeck, S. Calinon, A. Billard and M. Tscheligi
Proc. of the IEEE Intl Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (Ro-Man), (2009). [Detailed Record]

A probabilistic approach to learn and reproduce dynamics of human motion by imitation
S. Calinon, D. Caldwell, A. Billard and F. D'halluin. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

2009

Learning collaborative manipulation tasks by demonstration using a haptic interface
S. Calinon, P. Evrard, E. Gribovskaya, A. Billard and A. Kheddar
Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR), (2009). [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

2008

A Probabilistic Programming by Demonstration Framework Handling Constraints in Joint Space and Task Space
S. Calinon and A. Billard
Proc. IEEE/RSJ Intl Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), (2008). [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

A framework integrating statistical and social cues to teach a humanoid robot new skills
S. Calinon and A. Billard
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Workshop on Social Interaction with Intelligent Indoor Robots, (2008). [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

2007

Active Teaching in Robot Programming by Demonstration (Ro- Man'2007 best paper award)
S. Calinon and A. Billard
Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (Ro-Man), (2007) 702-707. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

Incremental Learning of Gestures by Imitation in a Humanoid Robot
S. Calinon and A. Billard
Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), (2007) 255-262. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

2006

Teaching a Humanoid Robot to Recognize and Reproduce Social Cues
S. Calinon and A. Billard
Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), (2006) 346-351. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

Learning Dynamical System Modulation for Constrained Reaching Tasks
M. Hersch, F. Guenter, S. Calinon and A. Billard
Proceedings of the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), (2006) 444-449. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

On Learning the Statistical Representation of a Task and Generalizing it to Various Contexts
S. Calinon, F. Guenter and A. Billard
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), (2006) 2978--2983. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

2005

A Humanoid Robot Drawing Human Portraits
S. Calinon, J. Epiney and A. Billard
IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, (2005). [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

Recognition and Reproduction of Gestures using a Probabilistic Framework combining PCA, ICA and HMM
S. Calinon and A. Billard
Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), (2005) 105--112. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

Goal-Directed Imitation in a Humanoid Robot
S. Calinon, F. Guenter and A. Billard
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), (2005) 299--304. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

2004

Stochastic Gesture Production and Recognition Model for a Humanoid Robot
S. Calinon and A. Billard
Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ international Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 3 (2004) 2769-2774. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

Gesture Recognition and Reproduction for a Humanoid Robot using Hidden Markov Models
S. Calinon and A. Billard
Proceedings of AMI/PASCAL/IM2/M4 Workshop on Multimodal Interaction and Related Machine Learning Algorithms, (2004). [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

2003

PDA Interface for Humanoid Robots
S. Calinon and A. Billard
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), (2003). [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

Ph.D. Theses

2007

Continuous extraction of task constraints in a robot programming by demonstration framework
S. Calinon
Ph.D. Thesis, 2007. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

Book Chapters

2008

Survey: Robot Programming by Demonstration
A. Billard, S. Calinon, R. Dillmann and S. Schaal
in Handbook of Robotics,  : MIT Press, 2008. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]

2007

Learning of Gestures by Imitation in a Humanoid Robot
S. Calinon and A. Billard
in Imitation and Social Learning in Robots, Humans and Animals: Behavioural, Social and Communicative Dimensions, Cambridge University Press, 2007. [Detailed Record] [PDF Format]