Robot learns to flip pancakes

Pancake day special!

The video shows a Barrett WAM robot learning to flip pancakes by reinforcement learning. The motion is encoded in a mixture of basis force fields through an extension of Dynamic Movement Primitives (DMP) that represents the synergies across the different variables through stiffness matrices. An Inverse Dynamics controller with variable stiffness is used for reproduction.

For pancake day special, the skill is first demonstrated via kinesthetic teaching, and then refined by Policy learning by Weighting Exploration with the Returns (PoWER) algorithm. After 50 trials, the robot learns that the first part of the task requires a stiff behavior to throw the pancake in the air, while the second part requires the hand to be compliant in order to catch the pancake without having it bounced off the pan.

Video credits:
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Dr. Petar Kormushev
http://kormushev.com

Dr. Sylvain Calinon
http://programming-by-demonstration.org

Affiliation:
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Advanced Robotics dept.
Italian Institute of Technology (IIT)

Link to publication about pancake flipping robot:
http://programming-by-demonstration.o...

Link to publication on PoWER algorithm by Jens Kober and Jan Peters:
http://books.nips.cc/papers/files/nip...

Pancake day special

• Category

  Science & Technology

[MonoTwai]

Aperture Science Panels: Day 1

"Today we tried teaching the panel arms to flip pancakes to test their coordination. This was a failure. They may still have merit as wall panels, however. Cave Johnson. We're done here."

[sn0wchyld]

do not try and try and build a robot to flip the pancake, thats impossible. instead only try to realise the truth... thats not a pancake.

[AaronLow1]

Surely it's easy to make a robotic arm mimic your movements... but can you do the math?

[yavan211]

nimetle şaka olmaz günah amk

[videogamercentral1]

GLaDOS it cant be that hard



[Alex stark]

Me- ROBOT JUST GIVE ME THE DAM THING

[George Deboo]

I may as well commit suicide because a robot flips pancakes better than me.

[TheNerd115]

Scout! We have pancakes!



[4slime]

This made me crack up laughing!

[emmettvm]

I have this mental image of the robotic arm getting frustrated and shouting "FUCK" then flinging the pancake at the guy running the experiment, giving him the finger, and storming out a la Thing from The Adams Family.

[Steve Richardson]

Once the robot figured what works, he does the same exact movement again and again with very little variation. Add a differently shaped pancake, (weight, size, etc) with some butter in the pan and it will end up on the floor again.

[Jonathon Reinhart]

The settling time is surprisingly poor.