Influencing robot learning through design and social interactions: a framework for balancing designer effort with active and explicit interactions

This thesis examines a balance between designer effort required in biasing a robot’s learn-ing of a task, and the effort required from an experienced agent in influencing the learning using social interactions, and the effect of this balance on learning performance. In order to characterise this balance, a two dimensional design space is identified, where the dimensions represent the effort from the designer, who abstracts the robot’s raw sensorimotor data accord-ing to the salient parts of the task to increasing degrees, and the effort from the experienced agent, who interacts with the learner robot using increasing degrees of complexities to actively accentuate the salient parts of the task and explicitly communicate about them. While the in-fluence from the designer must be imposed at design time, the influence from the experienced agent can be tailored during the social interactions because this agent is situated in the environ-ment while the robot is learning. The design space is proposed as a general characterisation of robotic systems that learn from social interactions. The usefulness of the design space is shown firstly by organising the related work into the space, secondly by providing empirical investigations of the effect of the various influences o

Learning to Sense Selectively in Physical Domains

In this paper we describe an approach to representing, using, and improving sensory skills for physical domains. We present Icarus, an architecture that represents control knowledge in terms of durative states and sequences of such states. The system operates in cycles, activating a state that matches the environmental situation and letting that state control behavior until its conditions fail or until finding another matching state with higher priority. Information about the probability that conditions will remain satisfied minimizes demands on sensing, as does knowledge about the durations of states and their likely successors. Three statistical learning methods let the system gradually reduce sensory load as it gains experience in a domain. We report experimental evaluations of this ability on three simulated physical tasks: flying an aircraft, steering a truck, and balancing a pole. Our experiments include lesion studies that identify the reduction in sensing due to each of the lea..