Efficient Model Learning from Joint-Action Demonstrations for Human-Robot Collaborative Tasks
We present a framework for automatically learning human user models from joint-action demonstrations that enables a robot to compute a robust policy for a collaborative task with a human. First, the demonstrated action sequences are clustered into different human types using an unsupervised learning...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
| Published: |
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
2017
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/107887 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1338-8107 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8239-5963 |
| Summary: | We present a framework for automatically learning human user models from joint-action demonstrations that enables a robot to compute a robust policy for a collaborative task with a human. First, the demonstrated action sequences are clustered into different human types using an unsupervised learning algorithm. A reward function is then learned for each type through the employment of an inverse reinforcement learning algorithm. The learned model is then incorporated into a mixed-observability Markov decision process (MOMDP) formulation, wherein the human type is a partially observable variable. With this framework, we can infer online the human type of a new user that was not included in the training set, and can compute a policy for the robot that will be aligned to the preference of this user. In a human subject experiment (n=30), participants agreed more strongly that the robot anticipated their actions when working with a robot incorporating the proposed framework (p<0.01), compared to manually annotating robot actions. In trials where participants faced difficulty annotating the robot actions to complete the task, the proposed framework significantly improved team efficiency (p<0.01). The robot incorporating the framework was also found to be more responsive to human actions compared to policies computed using a hand-coded reward function by a domain expert (p<0.01). These results indicate that learning human user models from joint-action demonstrations and encoding them in a MOMDP formalism can support effective teaming in human-robot collaborative tasks. |
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