Learning from Demonstration Framework for Multi-Robot Systems Using Interaction Keypoints and Soft Actor-Critic Methods

Abstract

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a promising approach to enable Multi-Robot Systems (MRS) to acquire complex skills and behaviors. However, the intricate interactions and coordination challenges in MRS pose significant hurdles for effective LfD. In this paper, we present a novel LfD framework specifically designed for MRS, which leverages visual demonstrations to capture and learn from robot-robot and robot-object interactions. Our framework introduces the concept of Interaction Keypoints (IKs) to transform the visual demonstrations into a representation that facilitates the inference of various skills necessary for the task. The robots then execute the task using sensorimotor actions and reinforcement learning (RL) policies when required. A key feature of our approach is the ability to handle unseen contact-based skills that emerge during the demonstration. In such cases, RL is employed to learn the skill using a classifier-based reward function, eliminating the need for manual reward engineering and ensuring adaptability to environmental changes. We evaluate our framework across a range of mobile robot tasks, covering both behavior-based and contact-based domains. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enabling robots to learn complex multi-robot tasks and behaviors from visual demonstrations.