Towards Learning Robotic Reaching and Pointing: An Uncalibrated Visual Servoing Approach

It is desirable for a robot to be able to operate in unstructured environments. In this paper, we demonstrate how a robot can learn primitive skills and we show how to augment them. We formalize 2D-decidable (pointing) and 3D-decidable (reaching) skills within an uncalibrated visual servoing framework. Skill decidability is defined in conjunction with an image-based controller, which has local asymptotic stability. In addition, we propose sequential composition of primitive skills to combine pointing and reaching skills in order to increase the accuracy of reaching skill. We use simple primitive tasks such as multi-point alignment and point-to-line alignment. We validate our results with real uncalibrated eye-in-hand experiments with a 4-DOF WAM from Barrett Technology Inc., alongside computer simulations.