I went to a seminar on collaborative robotics (industrial robots that work in close proximity with human workers) and one of the vendors had a robot arm that you programmed by simply moving it from position to position, telling it what technique to use to interpolate between them. You could also easily set up reference planes by probing the work area or workpiece, then constrict motion to an axis in that coordinate system, say for inserting parts into holes on an assembly. Not quite the "learning" system you describe, but easy to use and understand. I think one example application they showed was a robot that was programmed by this method to insert lifter rods in one side of a V8 engine block (which was hard to reach), while a human did the ones on the easy-to-see/reach side. It was pretty slick.