Modeling Interaction Structure for Robot Imitation Learning of Human Social Behavior

This study presents a learning-by-imitation technique that learns social robot interaction behaviors from natural human- human interaction data and requires minimum input from a designer. To solve the problem of responding to ambiguous human actions, a novel topic clustering algorithm based on action cooccurrence frequencies is introduced. The system learns human-readable rules that dictate which action the robot should take, based on the most recent human action and the current estimated topic of conversation. The technique is demonstrated in a scenario where the robot learns to play the role of a travel agent. The proposed technique outperformed several baseline techniques in qualitative and quantitative evaluations. It responded more accurately to ambiguous questions and participants found it was easier to understand, provided more information, and required less effort to interact with.