Incorporation of Expert Knowledge for Learning Robotic Assembly Tasks

Autonomous learning of robotic manipulation tasks is a desirable proposition for the future of industrial manufacturing to increase flexibility and reduce manual engineering effort. In particular assembly tasks that require contact-rich manipulation skills are challenging to accomplish with classical robotic control methods. The Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework provides a possibility to learn complex behaviors based on interaction with the environment. Although a lot of research has been done robotic assembly tasks remain a challenge for pure learning-based systems. In this paper we give an overview on grey-box learning approaches that integrate prior knowledge and learning based methods. Different dimensions of knowledge injection are identified, and knowledge representations are described. These representations are discussed in the context of industrial assembly processes to answer the question: how can process experts model their knowledge to boost RL approaches in the context of industrial assembly?