Unified Learning of Temporal Task Structure and Action Timing for Bimanual Robot Manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Dreher, Christian, Dormanns, Patrick, Meixner, Andre, Asfour, Tamim
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908870514835456
author Dreher, Christian
Dormanns, Patrick
Meixner, Andre
Asfour, Tamim
author_facet Dreher, Christian
Dormanns, Patrick
Meixner, Andre
Asfour, Tamim
contents Temporal task structure is fundamental for bimanual manipulation: a robot must not only know that one action precedes or overlaps another, but also when each action should occur and how long it should take. While symbolic temporal relations enable high-level reasoning about task structure and alternative execution sequences, concrete timing parameters are equally essential for coordinating two hands at the execution level. Existing approaches address these two levels in isolation, leaving a gap between high-level task planning and low-level movement synchronization. This work presents an approach for learning both symbolic and subsymbolic temporal task constraints from human demonstrations and deriving executable, temporally parametrized plans for bimanual manipulation. Our contributions are (i) a 3-dimensional representation of timings between two actions with methods based on multivariate Gaussian Mixture Models to represent temporal relationships between actions on a subsymbolic level, (ii) a method based on the Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland (DPLL) algorithm that finds and ranks all contradiction-free assignments of Allen relations to action pairs, representing different modes of a task, and (iii) an optimization-based planning system that combines the identified symbolic and subsymbolic temporal task constraints to derive temporally parametrized plans for robot execution. We evaluate our approach on several datasets, demonstrating that our method generates temporally parametrized plans closer to human demonstrations than the most characteristic demonstration baseline.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_06538
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unified Learning of Temporal Task Structure and Action Timing for Bimanual Robot Manipulation
Dreher, Christian
Dormanns, Patrick
Meixner, Andre
Asfour, Tamim
Robotics
Temporal task structure is fundamental for bimanual manipulation: a robot must not only know that one action precedes or overlaps another, but also when each action should occur and how long it should take. While symbolic temporal relations enable high-level reasoning about task structure and alternative execution sequences, concrete timing parameters are equally essential for coordinating two hands at the execution level. Existing approaches address these two levels in isolation, leaving a gap between high-level task planning and low-level movement synchronization. This work presents an approach for learning both symbolic and subsymbolic temporal task constraints from human demonstrations and deriving executable, temporally parametrized plans for bimanual manipulation. Our contributions are (i) a 3-dimensional representation of timings between two actions with methods based on multivariate Gaussian Mixture Models to represent temporal relationships between actions on a subsymbolic level, (ii) a method based on the Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland (DPLL) algorithm that finds and ranks all contradiction-free assignments of Allen relations to action pairs, representing different modes of a task, and (iii) an optimization-based planning system that combines the identified symbolic and subsymbolic temporal task constraints to derive temporally parametrized plans for robot execution. We evaluate our approach on several datasets, demonstrating that our method generates temporally parametrized plans closer to human demonstrations than the most characteristic demonstration baseline.
title Unified Learning of Temporal Task Structure and Action Timing for Bimanual Robot Manipulation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06538