Incremental Skill Learning of Stable Dynamical Systems

Abstract: Efficient skill acquisition, representation, and on-line adaptation to different scenarios has become of fundamental importance for assistive robotic applications. In the past decade, dynamical systems (DS) have arisen as a flexible and robust tool to represent learned skills and to generate motion trajectories. This work presents a novel approach to incrementally modify the dynamics of a generic autonomous DS when new demonstrations of a task are provided. A control input is learned from demonstrations to modify the trajectory of the system while preserving the stability properties of the reshaped DS. Learning is performed incrementally through Gaussian process regression, increasing the robot's knowledge of the skill every time a new demonstration is provided. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated with experiments on a publicly available dataset of complex motions.