Robotics: Science and Systems XVII

Planning Multimodal Exploratory Actions for Online Robot Attribute Learning

Xiaohan Zhang, Jivko Sinapov, Shiqi Zhang

Abstract:

Robots frequently need to perceive object attributes; such as "red;" "heavy;" and "empty;" using multimodal exploratory actions; such as "look;" "lift;" and "shake." Robot attribute learning algorithms aim to learn an observation model for each perceivable attribute given an exploratory action. Once the attribute models are learned; they can be used to identify attributes of new objects; answering questions; such as "Is this object red and empty?" Attribute learning and identification are being treated as two separate problems in the literature. In this paper; we first define a new problem called online robot attribute learning (On-RAL); where the robot works on attribute learning and attribute identification simultaneously. Then we develop an algorithm called information-theoretic reward shaping (ITRS) that actively addresses the trade-off between exploration and exploitation in On-RAL problems. ITRS was compared with competitive robot attribute learning baselines; and experimental results demonstrate ITRS' superiority in learning efficiency and identification accuracy.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{ZhangX-RSS-21, 
    AUTHOR    = {Xiaohan Zhang AND Jivko Sinapov AND Shiqi Zhang}, 
    TITLE     = {{Planning Multimodal Exploratory Actions for Online Robot Attribute Learning}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2021}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Virtual}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2021.XVII.005} 
}