Manipulation Manifolds

We explore the use of manifold learning techniques to uncover structure in sensorimotor time series from teleoperated humanoid manipulation tasks. Data from Robonaut, NASA’s humanoid robot, was recorded while it was being teleoperated through four tool manipulation tasks. We show that one algorithm, Spatio-Temporal Isomap, is capable of uncovering behavioral structures that can be difficult to find with other dimension reduction techniques (Principal Component Analysis, Multidimensional Scaling, and Isomap).