A Unified Multi-Layer Framework for Skill Acquisition from Imperfect Human Demonstrations

This paper presents a method for user-driven robot Learning from Demonstration (LfD) that reduces user effort while ensuring compliant and precise reproduction. The method eliminates repeated teaching for the same task and enables real-time learning from a single demonstration. Demonstrated motions are reproduced with high precision, while impedance variations are learned in real time to provide both compliance and robustness against perturbations. This mitigates potential safety issues in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) that arise from conventional time-indexed trajectories lacking compliance. The proposed approach integrates a three-dimensional (3D) Fast Diffeomorphic Matching (FDM) algorithm with a Dynamical System (DS)-based motion generator to achieve real-time single-shot demonstration learning and reproduction. An Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) framework compensates for reproduction errors and recovers from external interactions. Furthermore, an impedance parameterization function is incorporated to learn impedance variations from demonstrations and maintain surface contact for specific applications. The proposed approach is validated through comprehensive experiments on a 7 Degree-of-Freedom (DOF) KUKA LWR IV+ robot.

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) offers a promising paradigm for robot skill acquisition. Recent approaches attempt to extract manipulation commands directly from video demonstrations, yet face two critical challenges: (1) general video captioning models prioritize global scene features over task-relevant objects, producing descriptions unsuitable for precise robotic execution, and (2) end-to-end architectures coupling visual understanding with policy learning require extensive paired datasets and struggle to generalize across objects and scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a novel ``Human-to-Robot'' imitation learning pipeline that enables robots to acquire manipulation skills directly from unstructured video demonstrations, inspired by the human ability to learn by watching and imitating. Our key innovation is a modular framework that decouples the learning process into two distinct stages: (1) Video Understanding, which combines Temporal Shift Modules (TSM) with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to extract actions and identify interacted objects, and (2) Robot Imitation, which employs TD3-based deep reinforcement learning to execute the demonstrated manipulations. We validated our approach in PyBullet simulation environments with a UR5e manipulator and in a real-world experiment with a UF850 manipulator across four fundamental actions: reach, pick, move, and put. For video understanding, our method achieves 89.97% action classification accuracy and BLEU-4 scores of 0.351 on standard objects and 0.265 on novel objects, representing improvements of 76.4% and 128.4% over the best baseline, respectively. For robot manipulation, our framework achieves an average success rate of 87.5% across all actions, with 100% success on reaching tasks and up to 90% on complex pick-and-place operations. The project website is available at https://thanhnguyencanh.github.io/LfD4hri.

Haptic feedback provides an implicit channel for communicating safety intentions during human-robot shared control. Existing haptic guidance systems typically employ predefined intervention strategies that cannot accommodate the diverse safety preferences of individual users or application scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose a Learning from Haptics (LfH) framework that learns user-preferred safety interventions from sparse demonstrations, eliminating the need for manual trial-and-error design. Our framework is built on a differentiable Control Barrier Function (CBF)-based optimization layer that automatically adjusts the underlying safety parameters to match the demonstrated haptic responses. Instead of tuning controller parameters directly, users teach the system how they expect it to intervene during teleoperation. The resulting haptic guidance reflects the demonstrated intervention preferences while preserving the intuitive interaction of haptic shared control. Simulation and hardware experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework can learn personalized safety interventions from sparse user input and reduce the mismatch between the generated haptic feedback and the demonstrated preferences.