Intrinsic Motivation Systems for Autonomous Mental Development

Exploratory activities seem to be intrinsically rewarding for children and crucial for their cognitive development. Can a machine be endowed with such an intrinsic motivation system? This is the question we study in this paper, presenting a number of computational systems that try to capture this drive towards novel or curious situations. After discussing related research coming from developmental psychology, neuroscience, developmental robotics, and active learning, this paper presents the mechanism of Intelligent Adaptive Curiosity, an intrinsic motivation system which pushes a robot towards situations in which it maximizes its learning progress. This drive makes the robot focus on situations which are neither too predictable nor too unpredictable, thus permitting autonomous mental development.The complexity of the robot’s activities autonomously increases and complex developmental sequences self-organize without being constructed in a supervised manner. Two experiments are presented illustrating the stage-like organization emerging with this mechanism. In one of them, a physical robot is placed on a baby play mat with objects that it can learn to manipulate. Experimental results show that the robot first spends time in situations which are easy to learn, then shifts its attention progressively to situations of increasing difficulty, avoiding situations in which nothing can be learned. Finally, these various results are discussed in relation to more complex forms of behavioral organization and data coming from developmental psychology. Key words: Active learning, autonomy, behavior, complexity, curiosity, development, developmental trajectory, epigenetic robotics, intrinsic motivation, learning, reinforcement learning, values

Evolutionary robotics and neuroscience

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A general learning co-evolution method to generalize autonomous robot navigation behavior

Congress on Evolutionary Computation. La Jolla, CA, 16-19 July 2000.A new coevolutive method, called Uniform Coevolution, is introduced, to learn weights for a neural network controller in autonomous robots. An evolutionary strategy is used to learn high-performance reactive behavior for navigation and collision avoidance. The coevolutive method allows the evolution of the environment, to learn a general behavior able to solve the problem in different environments. Using a traditional evolutionary strategy method without coevolution, the learning process obtains a specialized behavior. All the behaviors obtained, with or without coevolution have been tested in a set of environments and the capability for generalization has been shown for each learned behavior. A simulator based on the mini-robot Khepera has been used to learn each behavior. The results show that Uniform Coevolution obtains better generalized solutions to example-based problems

Neural network controller against environment: A coevolutive approach to generalize robot navigation behavior

In this paper, a new coevolutive method, called Uniform Coevolution, is introduced to learn weights of a neural network controller in autonomous robots. An evolutionary strategy is used to learn high-performance reactive behavior for navigation and collisions avoidance. The introduction of coevolutive over evolutionary strategies allows evolving the environment, to learn a general behavior able to solve the problem in different environments. Using a traditional evolutionary strategy method, without coevolution, the learning process obtains a specialized behavior. All the behaviors obtained, with/without coevolution have been tested in a set of environments and the capability of generalization is shown for each learned behavior. A simulator based on a mini-robot Khepera has been used to learn each behavior. The results show that Uniform Coevolution obtains better generalized solutions to examples-based problems.Publicad

Fast Damage Recovery in Robotics with the T-Resilience Algorithm

Damage recovery is critical for autonomous robots that need to operate for a long time without assistance. Most current methods are complex and costly because they require anticipating each potential damage in order to have a contingency plan ready. As an alternative, we introduce the T-resilience algorithm, a new algorithm that allows robots to quickly and autonomously discover compensatory behaviors in unanticipated situations. This algorithm equips the robot with a self-model and discovers new behaviors by learning to avoid those that perform differently in the self-model and in reality. Our algorithm thus does not identify the damaged parts but it implicitly searches for efficient behaviors that do not use them. We evaluate the T-Resilience algorithm on a hexapod robot that needs to adapt to leg removal, broken legs and motor failures; we compare it to stochastic local search, policy gradient and the self-modeling algorithm proposed by Bongard et al. The behavior of the robot is assessed on-board thanks to a RGB-D sensor and a SLAM algorithm. Using only 25 tests on the robot and an overall running time of 20 minutes, T-Resilience consistently leads to substantially better results than the other approaches

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

Embodied Evolution in Collective Robotics: A Review

This paper provides an overview of evolutionary robotics techniques applied to on-line distributed evolution for robot collectives -- namely, embodied evolution. It provides a definition of embodied evolution as well as a thorough description of the underlying concepts and mechanisms. The paper also presents a comprehensive summary of research published in the field since its inception (1999-2017), providing various perspectives to identify the major trends. In particular, we identify a shift from considering embodied evolution as a parallel search method within small robot collectives (fewer than 10 robots) to embodied evolution as an on-line distributed learning method for designing collective behaviours in swarm-like collectives. The paper concludes with a discussion of applications and open questions, providing a milestone for past and an inspiration for future research.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl

Evolutionary Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning

There are two distinct approaches to solving reinforcement learning problems, namely, searching in value function space and searching in policy space. Temporal difference methods and evolutionary algorithms are well-known examples of these approaches. Kaelbling, Littman and Moore recently provided an informative survey of temporal difference methods. This article focuses on the application of evolutionary algorithms to the reinforcement learning problem, emphasizing alternative policy representations, credit assignment methods, and problem-specific genetic operators. Strengths and weaknesses of the evolutionary approach to reinforcement learning are presented, along with a survey of representative applications