Method and system for robot manipulation planning

A device for planning a manipulation task of a robot, the device comprising a processor, the processor configured to:

• learn a number of manipulation skills, thereby generating a symbolic abstraction of each of the manipulation skills and by which a respective statistic model of a transition to a respective final state from a respective current state is determined for each of the learned manipulation skills;
• determine a concatenated sequence of a subset of the manipulation skills selected from the number of learned manipulation skills based on their symbolic abstractions so that a given goal specification indicating a complex manipulation task is satisfied;
• and
• instruct execution of the sequence of manipulation skills;
• wherein:
• the determination of the concatenated sequence includes generating a complete model corresponding to a combination, in the sequence, of all of the subset of the manipulation skills;
• and
• the generating of the complete model is performed by computing, for each of a plurality of pairwise combinations of individual manipulation skills of the subset, a respective probability of a transition from a first one of the individual manipulation skills of the respective pairwise combination to a second one of the individual manipulation skills of the respective pairwise combination according to a divergence of emission probabilities between an end state of the first one of the individual manipulation skills of the respective pairwise combination and an initial state of the second one of the individual manipulation skills of the respective pairwise combination.

A non-transitory machine-readable storage medium on which is stored a computer program that is executable by a computer and that, when executed by the computer, causes the computer to perform a method for planning a manipulation task of a robot, the method comprising the following steps:

• learning a number of manipulation skills and generating a symbolic abstraction of each of the manipulation skills, by which a respective statistic model of a transition to a respective final state from a respective current state is determined for each of the learned manipulation skills;
• determining a concatenated sequence of a subset of the manipulation skills selected from the number of learned manipulation skills based on their symbolic abstractions so that a given goal specification indicating a given complex manipulation task is satisfied, wherein:
• the determining of the concatenated sequence includes generating a complete model corresponding to a combination, in the sequence, of all of the subset of the manipulation skills;
• and
• the generating of the complete model is performed by computing, for each of a plurality of pairwise combinations of individual manipulation skills of the subset, a respective probability of a transition from a first one of the individual manipulation skills of the respective pairwise combination to a second one of the individual manipulation skills of the respective pairwise combination according to a divergence of emission probabilities between an end state of the first one of the individual manipulation skills of the respective pairwise combination and an initial state of the second one of the individual manipulation skills of the respective pairwise combination;
• and
• executing the sequence of manipulation skills.