A. L. Thomaz, C. Breazeal

Abstract

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 initial experiment shows how a human shapes the learning process through suggesting actions, drawing attention to goal states, and arranging the environment to encourage generalization.