Proleptic Temporal Ensemble for Improving the Speed of Robot Tasks Generated by Imitation Learning

Abstract: Imitation learning, which enables robots to learn behaviors from demonstrations by human, has emerged as a promising solution for generating robot motions in such environments. The imitation learning-based robot motion generation method, however, has the drawback of depending on the demonstrator's task execution speed. This paper presents a novel temporal ensemble approach applied to imitation learning algorithms, allowing for execution of future actions. The proposed method leverages existing demonstration data and pre-trained policies, offering the advantages of requiring no additional computation and being easy to implement. The algorithms performance was validated through real-world experiments involving robotic block color sorting, demonstrating up to 3x increase in task execution speed while maintaining a high success rate compared to the action chunking with transformer method. This study highlights the potential for significantly improving the performance of imitation learning-based policies, which were previously limited by the demonstrator's speed. It is expected to contribute substantially to future advancements in autonomous object manipulation technologies aimed at enhancing productivity.