2 research outputs found
Neural Network Based Reinforcement Learning for Audio-Visual Gaze Control in Human-Robot Interaction
This paper introduces a novel neural network-based reinforcement learning
approach for robot gaze control. Our approach enables a robot to learn and to
adapt its gaze control strategy for human-robot interaction neither with the
use of external sensors nor with human supervision. The robot learns to focus
its attention onto groups of people from its own audio-visual experiences,
independently of the number of people, of their positions and of their physical
appearances. In particular, we use a recurrent neural network architecture in
combination with Q-learning to find an optimal action-selection policy; we
pre-train the network using a simulated environment that mimics realistic
scenarios that involve speaking/silent participants, thus avoiding the need of
tedious sessions of a robot interacting with people. Our experimental
evaluation suggests that the proposed method is robust against parameter
estimation, i.e. the parameter values yielded by the method do not have a
decisive impact on the performance. The best results are obtained when both
audio and visual information is jointly used. Experiments with the Nao robot
indicate that our framework is a step forward towards the autonomous learning
of socially acceptable gaze behavior.Comment: Paper submitted to Pattern Recognition Letter