Conditional Neural Expert Processes for Learning from Demonstration

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a widely used technique for skill acquisition in robotics. However, demonstrations of the same skill may exhibit significant variances, or learning systems may attempt to acquire different means of the same skill simultaneously, making it challenging to encode these motions into movement primitives. To address these challenges, we propose an LfD framework, namely the Conditional Neural Expert Processes (CNEP), that learns to assign demonstrations from different modes to distinct expert networks utilizing the inherent information within the latent space to match experts with the encoded representations. CNEP does not require supervision on which mode the trajectories belong to. Provided experiments on artificially generated datasets demonstrate the efficacy of CNEP. Furthermore, we compare the performance of CNEP with another LfD framework, namely Conditional Neural Movement Primitives (CNMP), on a range of tasks, including experiments on a real robot. The results reveal enhanced modeling performance for movement primitives, leading to the synthesis of trajectories that more accurately reflect those demonstrated by experts, particularly when the model inputs include intersection points from various trajectories. Additionally, CNEP offers improved interpretability and faster convergence by promoting expert specialization. Furthermore, we show that the CNEP model accomplishes obstacle avoidance tasks with a real manipulator when provided with novel start and destination points, in contrast to the CNMP model, which leads to collisions with the obstacle.