Patent ID: 6856319

Claim:
A method of manipulating an object comprising: collecting a plurality of example manipulations of the object; annotating the examples with one or more parameters; creating an interpolation function that passes through the annotated examples, the interpolation being based at least in part on a plurality of radial basis functions; determining that the interpolation function fails to meet a criterion; adding at least one additional example; recomputing the interpolation function based on the original annotated example and the at least one additional example, wherein the additional example comprises a pseudo-example, and wherein the act of adding at least one additional example comprises: identifying a value p that produces a maximal value of ∥x e (p)−p∥, wherein p is a set of parameters in an annotation space and x e is a function that produces an end-effector position for the object based on p; and identifying a value p′ that produces a minimal value of ∥x e (p′)−p∥, wherein p′ is the pseudo-example.