Intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning for human-robot interaction in the real-world
This addresses the challenge of enabling robots to interact naturally with humans in uncontrolled environments, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing reinforcement learning methods.
The paper tackled the problem of robots learning human-like social skills in real-world human-robot interaction without direct instructions, and the result showed that the robot acquired these skills and made more human-like decisions than a task-rewarded robot on a test dataset.
For a natural social human-robot interaction, it is essential for a robot to learn the human-like social skills. However, learning such skills is notoriously hard due to the limited availability of direct instructions from people to teach a robot. In this paper, we propose an intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning framework in which an agent gets the intrinsic motivation-based rewards through the action-conditional predictive model. By using the proposed method, the robot learned the social skills from the human-robot interaction experiences gathered in the real uncontrolled environments. The results indicate that the robot not only acquired human-like social skills but also took more human-like decisions, on a test dataset, than a robot which received direct rewards for the task achievement.