Seq2Seq Imitation Learning for Tactile Feedback-based Manipulation

Robot control for tactile feedback based manipulation can be difficult due to modeling of physical contacts, partial observability of the environment, and noise in perception and control. This work focuses on solving partial observability of contact-rich manipulation tasks as a Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) Imitation Learning (IL) problem. The proposed Seq2Seq model first produces a robot-environment interaction sequence to estimate the partially observable environment state variables, and then, the observed interaction sequence is transformed to a control sequence for the task itself. The proposed Seq2Seq IL for tactile feedback based manipulation is experimentally validated on a door-open task in a simulated environment and a snap-on insertion task with a real robot. The model is able to learn both tasks from only 50 expert demonstrations while state-of-the-art reinforcement learning and imitation learning methods fail.