%Aigaion2 BibTeX export from Idiap Publications %Saturday 23 November 2024 09:24:40 AM @INPROCEEDINGS{Pignat_ICRA_2020, author = {Pignat, Emmanuel and Lembono, Teguh Santoso and Calinon, Sylvain}, projects = {Idiap}, title = {Variational Inference with Mixture Model Approximation for Applications in Robotics}, booktitle = {International Conference on Robotics and Automation}, year = {2020}, abstract = {We propose to formulate the problem of repre- senting a distribution of robot configurations (e.g. joint angles) as that of approximating a product of experts. Our approach uses variational inference, a popular method in Bayesian computation, which has several practical advantages over sampling-based techniques. To be able to represent complex and multimodal distributions of configurations, mixture models are used as approximate distribution. We show that the problem of approximating a distribution of robot configurations while satisfying multiple objectives arises in a wide range of problems in robotics, for which the properties of the proposed approach have relevant consequences. Several applications are discussed, including learning objectives from demonstration, planning, and warm-starting inverse kinematics problems. Simulated experiments are presented with a 7-DoF Panda arm and a 28-DoF Talos humanoid.}, pdf = {https://publications.idiap.ch/attachments/papers/2020/Pignat_ICRA_2020.pdf} }