Robot Learning

Skill Primitive

A skill primitive is a basic, parameterized unit of robot behavior — such as grasp, push, pour, or move-to-pose — that accepts arguments like target poses or objects and can be composed into complex tasks. Primitives may be implemented as hand-coded controllers, dynamic movement primitives, or small learned policies. Hierarchical systems act over primitives instead of raw joint commands, shortening effective task horizons by orders of magnitude.

Why it matters for physical AI

Choosing the action abstraction is a central design decision in robot learning: primitives dramatically improve sample efficiency and planning tractability at some cost in dexterity and expressiveness.