Learning Motor Primitives for Robotics

This video exhibits current progress in motor skill learning. It shows two tasks: paddling a ball on a string and ball-in-a-cup, which is also known as Kendama. For paddling a ball on a string, a demonstration of a human teacher is shown and the system can directly acquire this behavior by imitation learning. For ball-in-a-cup, first an imitation is demonstrated by a teacher. Subsequently, the robot attempts to reproduce the behavior but fails. Hence, the robot explores new strategies getting better most of the time — selected trials are being shown in the video. After 90-100 trials, the robot finally gets perfect and gets the ball in all the time.