Learn to Coordinate: a Whole-Body Learning from Demonstration Framework for Differential Drive Mobile Manipulators

This paper proposes a whole-body learning from demonstration (LfD) framework that enables differential drive mobile manipulators to learn coordination working and disturbance rejection. First, an efficient kinesthetic teaching method is devised based on the weighted least-norm (WLN) inverse kinematics solution and an admittance controller, which facilitates human users to guide the mobile manipulator to perform tasks. Second, we propose a whole-body LfD framework through Gaussian Process, which endows the mobile manipulator's skill learning process with features of large-scale convergence, coordination working and disturbance rejection, after just a few human demonstrations. The proposed learning framework also allows for human-in-the-loop correction when the whole-body is conducting a task. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed framework is verified via two simulations and a pick-and-place experiment. Supplementary video for this paper is available in github ^{† †} https://github.com/yuqiang-yang/SMC2023-Video.