Through Social Cobots: Robots with Human-Like Collaboration Skills
This study is a part of a collaboration with DAI-Labor of TU Berlin, Germany. We envision the future of collaborative robots (cobots) in industry through their fully autonomous human-like collaboration with human partners.
Our research aims to address the question: "How do we build cobots with human-like natural collaboration skills?". Existing intention-aware planning approaches often make the assumptions that a human collaborator's actions are always relevant to the collaborated task and that the human always accepts the cobot's assistance when offered.
We believe that these assumptions are a significant barrier against having social cobots in the real world. In reality, a human's dynamic desires and emotional states could result in stochastic human intentions, especially in repeated tasks. A cobot with these assumptions may misinterpret the human actions, which may result in intrusive and unreasonable robot behaviors (e.g. a human gazing at an object might be interpreted as she needs it, yet behind this gaze, she could be evaluating to take it herself or thinking of something irrelevant to the task like staring into space).
Our goal is to offer a new model design as an alternative to the conventional intention-aware models by removing these assumptions. The result is our novel robot decision-making model, a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), that is capable of handling these dynamic...
Introduction
An important area of study in the field of Reinforcement Learning (RL) is Transfer Learning where the aim is to leverage previous experiences to accelerate learning in a new unseen tasks. While it is clear that living organisms apply transfer learning throughout their lives, it is often unclear how this transfer mechanism exhibited by living organisms can be incorporated into autonomous agents
As a concrete example, consider a simple Sokoban task as below.
Once a human completes this task they have learned core concepts about the underlying structure of the Sokoban domain. For example, they would learn that the warehouse-keeper:
- cannot walk through walls,
- cannot push a box that is adjacent to another box
- cannot push a box that is adjacent to a wall
Now suppose the human would be given this new more complex task to solve.
Clearly, the human would re-use the rules they had previously learned in the simple task to gain an advantage in this new task. Unfortunately, most state-of-the art RL algorithms would not leverage such knowledge and would instead re-learn everything from scratch on the more complex task. Such wastefulness of prior experience is clearly inefficient!
Object-Oriented Representation
One idea that has shown promise in transfer learning is the notion of object-oriented representation. With this approach we view a task as being instances of objects classes. For example, any Sokoban task can be thought of as made objects that are instances...
Introduction
DRM-connect is an algorithm for motion planning and replanning, and is a combination of dynamic reachability maps (DRM) with lazy collision checking and a fallback strategy based on the RRT-connect algorithm, which is used to repair the roadmap through further exploration.
Trajectory planning and replanning in complex environments often reuses very little information from previous solutions. This is particularly evident when the motion is repeated multiple times with only a limited amount of variation between each run. Graph-based planning offers fast replanning at the cost of significant pre-computation, while probabilistic planning requires no pre-computation at the cost of slow replanning.
We attempt to offer the best of both by proposing the DRM-connect algorithm.
Algorithm
Offline, an approximate Reeb graph is constructed from the trajectories of prior tasks in the same or similar environments.
For a new planning or replanning query, DRM-connect searches this Reeb graph for a trajectory to complete the task (checking collisions lazily). If no path is found, DRM-connect iterates between attempting to repair the disconnected subgraphs through a process similar to RRT-connect (operating on multiple graphs, rather than trees) and searching for paths through the graph. Since DRM-connect is probabilistically complete, the likelihood of a successful trajectory being returned approaches one as time tends to infinity.
Further work will incorporate online updates...
A big congratulations to Roy Eyono whose poster, Learning to Backpropagate, was awarded the IBM Poster Prize at the 2018 Deep Learning Indaba!
We are co-organising the 2nd annual Deep Learning Indaba which will be held at Stellenbosch University from 9-14 September 2018.
The Deep Learning Indaba exists to celebrate and strengthen machine learning in Africa through state-of-the-art teaching, networking, policy debate, and through our support programmes, such as the IndabaX and the Kambule and Maathai awards. The Indaba works towards the vision of Africans becoming critical contributors, owners, and shapers of the coming advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The report on the outcomes of the first Indaba 2017 can be read here.
Congratulations to Steven James, who was one of four people to be awarded a Google Africa PhD Fellowship, and the only one in the "Machine Learning" category.
