Learning from human teachers with Socially Guided Exploration

— We present a learning mechanism, Socially Guided Exploration, in which a robot learns new tasks through a combination of self-exploration and social interaction. The system’s motivational drives (novelty, mastery), along with social scaffolding from a human partner, bias behavior to create learning opportunities for a Reinforcement Learning mechanism. The system is able to learn on its own, but can flexibly use the guidance of a human partner to improve performance. An experiment with non-expert human subjects shows a human is able to shape the learning process through suggesting actions and drawing attention to goal states. Human guidance results in a task set that is significantly more focused and efficient, while self exploration results in a broader set.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICRA
• Authors: Cynthia Breazeal, Andrea Lockerd Thomaz
• Keywords: Human, Human Partner, ICRA 2008, Reinforcement Learning Mechanism, Robotics