Learning Prioritized Control of Motor Primitives

Abstract: Many tasks in robotics can be decomposed into sub-tasks that are performed simultaneously. In many cases, these sub-tasks cannot all be achieved jointly and a prioritization of such sub-tasks is required to resolve this issue. In this paper, we discuss a novel learning approach that allows to learn a prioritized control law built on a set of sub-tasks represented by motor primitives. The primitives are executed simultaneously but have different priorities. Primitives of higher priority can override the commands of the conflicting lower priority ones. The dominance structure of these primitives has a significant impact on the performance of the prioritized control law. We evaluate the proposed approach with a ball bouncing task on a Barrett WAM.