43,410 research outputs found
Danger-aware Adaptive Composition of DRL Agents for Self-navigation
Self-navigation, referred as the capability of automatically reaching the
goal while avoiding collisions with obstacles, is a fundamental skill required
for mobile robots. Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has shown great
potential in the development of robot navigation algorithms. However, it is
still difficult to train the robot to learn goal-reaching and
obstacle-avoidance skills simultaneously. On the other hand, although many
DRL-based obstacle-avoidance algorithms are proposed, few of them are reused
for more complex navigation tasks. In this paper, a novel danger-aware adaptive
composition (DAAC) framework is proposed to combine two individually
DRL-trained agents, obstacle-avoidance and goal-reaching, to construct a
navigation agent without any redesigning and retraining. The key to this
adaptive composition approach is that the value function outputted by the
obstacle-avoidance agent serves as an indicator for evaluating the risk level
of the current situation, which in turn determines the contribution of these
two agents for the next move. Simulation and real-world testing results show
that the composed Navigation network can control the robot to accomplish
difficult navigation tasks, e.g., reaching a series of successive goals in an
unknown and complex environment safely and quickly.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figure
Learning at the Ends: From Hand to Tool Affordances in Humanoid Robots
One of the open challenges in designing robots that operate successfully in
the unpredictable human environment is how to make them able to predict what
actions they can perform on objects, and what their effects will be, i.e., the
ability to perceive object affordances. Since modeling all the possible world
interactions is unfeasible, learning from experience is required, posing the
challenge of collecting a large amount of experiences (i.e., training data).
Typically, a manipulative robot operates on external objects by using its own
hands (or similar end-effectors), but in some cases the use of tools may be
desirable, nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that while a robot can
collect many sensorimotor experiences using its own hands, this cannot happen
for all possible human-made tools.
Therefore, in this paper we investigate the developmental transition from
hand to tool affordances: what sensorimotor skills that a robot has acquired
with its bare hands can be employed for tool use? By employing a visual and
motor imagination mechanism to represent different hand postures compactly, we
propose a probabilistic model to learn hand affordances, and we show how this
model can generalize to estimate the affordances of previously unseen tools,
ultimately supporting planning, decision-making and tool selection tasks in
humanoid robots. We present experimental results with the iCub humanoid robot,
and we publicly release the collected sensorimotor data in the form of a hand
posture affordances dataset.Comment: dataset available at htts://vislab.isr.tecnico.ulisboa.pt/, IEEE
International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic
Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob 2017
Show, Attend and Interact: Perceivable Human-Robot Social Interaction through Neural Attention Q-Network
For a safe, natural and effective human-robot social interaction, it is
essential to develop a system that allows a robot to demonstrate the
perceivable responsive behaviors to complex human behaviors. We introduce the
Multimodal Deep Attention Recurrent Q-Network using which the robot exhibits
human-like social interaction skills after 14 days of interacting with people
in an uncontrolled real world. Each and every day during the 14 days, the
system gathered robot interaction experiences with people through a
hit-and-trial method and then trained the MDARQN on these experiences using
end-to-end reinforcement learning approach. The results of interaction based
learning indicate that the robot has learned to respond to complex human
behaviors in a perceivable and socially acceptable manner.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, accepted by IEEE-RAS ICRA'1
An evolutionary behavioral model for decision making
For autonomous agents the problem of deciding what to do next becomes increasingly complex when acting in unpredictable and dynamic environments pursuing multiple and possibly conflicting goals. One of the most relevant behavior-based model that tries to deal with this problem is the one proposed by Maes, the Bbehavior Network model. This model proposes a set of behaviors as purposive perception-action units which are linked in a nonhierarchical network, and whose behavior selection process is orchestrated by spreading activation dynamics. In spite of being an adaptive model (in the sense of self-regulating its own behavior selection process), and despite the fact that several extensions have been proposed in order to improve the original model adaptability, there is not a robust model yet that can self-modify adaptively both the topological structure and the functional purpose\ud
of the network as a result of the interaction between the agent and its environment. Thus, this work proffers an innovative hybrid model driven by gene expression programming, which makes two main contributions: (1) given an initial set of meaningless and unconnected units, the evolutionary mechanism is able to build well-defined and robust behavior networks which are adapted and specialized to concrete internal agent's needs and goals; and (2)\ud
the same evolutionary mechanism is able to assemble quite\ud
complex structures such as deliberative plans (which operate in the long-term) and problem-solving strategies
Developmental Robots - A New Paradigm
It has been proved to be extremely challenging for humans to program a robot to such a sufficient degree that it acts properly in a typical unknown human environment. This is especially true for a humanoid robot due to the very large number of redundant degrees of freedom and a large number of sensors that are required for a humanoid to work safely and effectively in the human environment. How can we address this fundamental problem? Motivated by human mental development from infancy to adulthood, we present a theory, an architecture, and some experimental results showing how to enable a robot to develop its mind automatically, through online, real time interactions with its environment. Humans mentally “raise” the robot through “robot sitting” and “robot schools” instead of task-specific robot programming
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