Self-augmented robot trajectory: efficient imitation learning via safe self-augmentation with demonstrator-annotated precision

Imitation learning is a promising paradigm for training robot agents; however, standard approaches typically require substantial data acquisition – via numerous demonstrations or random exploration – to ensure reliable performance. Although exploration reduces human effort, it lacks safety guarantees and often results in frequent collisions – particularly in clearance-limited tasks (e.g. peg-in-hole) – thereby, necessitating manual environmental resets and imposing additional human burden. This study proposes Self-Augmented Robot Trajectory (SART), a framework that enables policy learning from a single human demonstration, while safely expanding the dataset through autonomous augmentation. SART consists of two stages: (1) human teaching only once, where a single demonstration is provided and precision boundaries – represented as spheres around key waypoints – are annotated, followed by one environment reset; (2) robot self-augmentation, where the robot generates diverse, collision-free trajectories within these boundaries and reconnects to the original demonstration. This design improves the data collection efficiency by minimizing human effort while ensuring safety. Extensive evaluations in simulation and real-world manipulation tasks show that SART achieves substantially higher success rates than policies trained solely on human-collected demonstrations. Video results available at https://sites.google.com/view/sart-il.