"Right. I mean, the whole idea that really is pursued here is human. I mean, if we think about human, human never go through this exercise of precisely planning every aspect of their motion. We do not compute a full trajectory or a full plan. What we do is like we are sitting here, and after the interview you’re going to go back to the parking. You’re not going to plan all the details of that motion. What you know is you need to go to a door and you know that it’s going to be feasible to go to the door. Probably you have some intermediate landmark along the way. So we plan with this concept of feasible, reachable locations, and along the way we know that we are going to accommodate our motion using our reactive behavior. We are interacting with the world as we are moving. In your car you are driving around other cars and people and bicycles. It wasn’t completely in the plan. But you know that skill is there. Ee make use of skills, and what we do when we are interacting with the physical world, when we are making contact, when we are assembling objects, when we are putting things together. We are also using skills. When we are playing tennis, when we are doing any challenging task, we are using skills. So the idea is let’s then plan – first of all, let’s develop those skills for the robot. That is, skills are a more abstract, a more advanced capability for the robot than the simple control of following a trajectory or reaching a point or just touching a surface. It is a skill to say, “I’m able to accomplish this task, taking into account different things.” By building those skills, the planner can plan using those skills. So the task of planning becomes much less difficult and complex, and in real-time, the skills can perform at much faster servo rate than any dependency, full dependency, on the planner that would be required if we didn’t have the skills. So all the challenge is, “How can we teach these robots those skills?” This is what we are doing. We are making use of a lot of fundamental characteristics of those robots in term of their kinematics, dynamic models, so that we build the first layer and then we abstract that layer to create a behavior that can accomplish a different task in the environment with obstacles, with a object. So we talk about compliant motion behaviors that allow the robot, for instance, to move to a multi-contact with the environment by just detecting and feeling those contacts. You can imagine a task of just putting a lid on a box. This is something really hard, if we want to do it just by controlling the motion and the position, but actually this is something that becomes very easy if we understand compliant motion. So this becomes a skill that then could be used and reused in different situation."
January 1, 1970
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oussama_Khatib