5 research outputs found
Natural task learning through simultaneous language grounding and action learning
Artificial agents and in particular robots, i.e. agents with some form of embodiment, provide
nearly unlimited possibilities to support humans in their daily lives by reliably performing
hazardous, repetitive, and physically demanding tasks, removing the risk of human errors,
and providing social, mental, and physical care as needed, and around-the-clock. However,
for this, artificial agents need to be able to communicate with other agents, in particular
humans, in a natural and efficient manner, and to autonomously learn new tasks. The most
natural way for humans to tell another agent to perform a task or to explain how to perform
a task is through natural language. Therefore, artificial agents need to be able to understand
natural language, i.e. extract the meanings of words and phrases, which requires words and
phrases to be linked to their corresponding percepts through grounding.
Theoretically, groundings, i.e. connections between words and percepts, can be manually
specified, however, in practice this is not possible due to the complexity and dynamicity
of human-centered environments, like private homes or supermarkets, and the ambiguity
inherent to natural language, e.g. synonymy and homonymy. Therefore, agents need to be
able to autonomously obtain new groundings and continuously update existing groundings to
account for changes in the environment and incorporate new information obtained through
the agent’s sensors. Furthermore, the obtained groundings should be utilizable to learn new
tasks from natural language instructions.
Therefore, this thesis proposes a novel framework for simultaneous language grounding and
action learning that achieves three main objectives. First, it enables agents to continuously
ground synonymous words and phrases without requiring external support by another agent.
Second, it enables agents to utilize external support, if available, without depending on it.
Finally, it enables agents to utilize previously learned groundings to learn new tasks from
language instructions
Musical Haptics
Haptic Musical Instruments; Haptic Psychophysics; Interface Design and Evaluation; User Experience; Musical Performanc
Musical Haptics
Haptic Musical Instruments; Haptic Psychophysics; Interface Design and Evaluation; User Experience; Musical Performanc