Optimal Interactive Learning on the Job via Facility Location Planning
This work addresses the challenge of sustained, multi-task collaboration for robots and users, offering an incremental improvement over prior single-task methods.
The paper tackles the problem of reducing human effort in multi-task collaborative robot learning by proposing COIL, a planner that strategically selects query types to minimize work, achieving significant reductions in human workload while maintaining task success.
Collaborative robots must continually adapt to novel tasks and user preferences without overburdening the user. While prior interactive robot learning methods aim to reduce human effort, they are typically limited to single-task scenarios and are not well-suited for sustained, multi-task collaboration. We propose COIL (Cost-Optimal Interactive Learning) -- a multi-task interaction planner that minimizes human effort across a sequence of tasks by strategically selecting among three query types (skill, preference, and help). When user preferences are known, we formulate COIL as an uncapacitated facility location (UFL) problem, which enables bounded-suboptimal planning in polynomial time using off-the-shelf approximation algorithms. We extend our formulation to handle uncertainty in user preferences by incorporating one-step belief space planning, which uses these approximation algorithms as subroutines to maintain polynomial-time performance. Simulated and physical experiments on manipulation tasks show that our framework significantly reduces the amount of work allocated to the human while maintaining successful task completion.