Teaching robots by moulding behavior and scaffolding the environment

Programming robots to carry out useful tasks is both a complex and non-trivial exercise. A simple and intuitive method to allow humans to train and shape robot behaviour is clearly a key goal in making this task easier. This paper describes an approach to this problem based on studies of social animals where two teaching strategies are applied to allow a human teacher to train a robot by moulding its actions within a carefully scaffolded environment. Within these enviroments sets of competences can be built by building state/action memory maps of the robot’s interaction within that environment. These memory maps are then polled using a k-nearest neighbour based algorithm to provide a generalised competence. We take a novel approach in building the memory models by allowing the human teacher to construct them in a hierarchical manner. This mechanism allows a human trainer to build and extend an action-selection mechanism into which new skills can be added to the robot’s repertoire of existing competencies. These techniques are implemented on physical Khepera miniature robots and validated on a variety of tasks.