Sample-Efficient Robot Motion Learning using Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models

Robotic manipulators are reaching a state where we could see them in household environments in the following decade. Nevertheless, such robots need to be easy to instruct by lay people. This is why kinesthetic teaching has become very popular in recent years, in which the robot is taught a motion that is encoded as a parametric function - usually a Movement Primitive (MP)-. This approach produces trajectories that are usually suboptimal, and the...