Autonomous and Online Generation of Skills Inferring Actions Adapted to Low-Level and High-Level Contextual States
Carlos Maestre · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2018
Robots are expected to assist us in our daily tasks. To that end, they may need to perform different tasks in changing scenarios. The number of dissimilar scenarios a robot can face is unlimited. Therefore, it is plausible to think that a robot must learn autonomously to perform tasks. A task consists in generating an expected change, i.e. an effect, in the environment, the robot configuration, or both. Therefore, the robot must learn to perform the right action on the environment to obtain the expected effect. An approach to learning these actions is through a continuous interaction of the robot with its environment focusing on those actions producing effects on the environment. The acquired relation of applying an action on an object to obtain an effect is called affordance. During the last years many Research efforts were devoted toaffordance learning. Related works cover from the learning of simple push actions on tabletop scenarios to the definition of complex cognitive architectures. These works rely on different building blocks, as vision methods to identify the position of the objects or predefined sensorimotor skills to generate effects on a constrained environment. The use of predefined actions eases the learning of affordances, producing a rich and consistent information oft he changes produce don an object. However, we claim that the use of these actions constrains the scalability of the available experiments to dynamic and noisy environments. The current work addresses the autonomous learning of a set of sensorimotor skills through interactions with an environment. Each skill must generate a continuous action to reproduce an effect on an object, adapted to the object position. Besides, each skill is simultaneously adapted to low level perturbations, e.g. a change in the object position, and high-level contextual changes, e.g. a stove gets on [...]