Bayesian Active Learning for Collaborative Task Specification Using Equivalence Regions
This addresses the challenge for non-expert users in industrial facilities to specify complex task rules without intuition about robot performance, though it is incremental as it extends previous work.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling non-expert users to specify acceptable robot behaviors in shared environments by developing a Bayesian active learning system that interacts with users to optimize performance. It demonstrates convergence to user-optimal paths in simulations on realistic industrial settings.
Specifying complex task behaviours while ensuring good robot performance may be difficult for untrained users. We study a framework for users to specify rules for acceptable behaviour in a shared environment such as industrial facilities. As non-expert users might have little intuition about how their specification impacts the robot's performance, we design a learning system that interacts with the user to find an optimal solution. Using active preference learning, we iteratively show alternative paths that the robot could take on an interface. From the user feedback ranking the alternatives, we learn about the weights that users place on each part of their specification. We extend the user model from our previous work to a discrete Bayesian learning model and introduce a greedy algorithm for proposing alternative that operates on the notion of equivalence regions of user weights. We prove that with this algorithm the revision active learning process converges on the user-optimal path. In simulations on realistic industrial environments, we demonstrate the convergence and robustness of our approach.