Shaping robot behaviour with unlabeled human instructions

摘要

Most of current interactive learning systems rely on predefined protocols that constrain the interaction with the user. Relaxing the constraints of interaction protocols can therefore improve the usability of these systems.This thesis tackles the question of interpreting human instructions, in order to relax the constraints about predetermining their meanings. We propose a framework that enables a human teacher to shape a robot behaviour, by interactively providing it with unlabeled instructions. Our approach consists in grounding the meaning of instruction signals in the task learning process, and using them simultaneously for guiding the latter. This approach has a two-fold advantage. First, it provides more freedom to the teacher in choosing his preferred signals. Second, it reduces the required engineering efforts, by removing the necessity to encode the meaning of each instruction signal. We implement our framework as a modular architecture, named TICS, that offers the possibility to combine different information sources: a predefined reward function, evaluative feedback and unlabeled instructions. This allows for more flexibility in the teaching process, by enabling the teacher to switch between different learning modes. Particularly, we propose several methods for interpreting instructions, and a new method for combining evaluative feedback with a predefined reward function. We evaluate our framework through a series of experiments, performed both in simulation and with real robots. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in accelerating the task learning process, and in reducing the number of required interactions with the teacher.