APPARATUS AND METHODS FOR CONTROL OF ROBOT ACTIONS BASED ON CORRECTIVE USER INPUTS

摘要

Robots have the capacity to perform a broad range of useful tasks, such as factory automation, cleaning, delivery, assistive care, environmental monitoring and entertainment. Enabling a robot to perform a new task in a new environment typically requires a large amount of new software to be written, often by a team of experts. It would be valuable if future technology could empower people, who may have limited or no understanding of software coding, to train robots to perform custom tasks. Some implementations of the present invention provide methods and systems that respond to users' corrective commands to generate and refine a policy for determining appropriate actions based on sensor-data input. Upon completion of learning, the system can generate control commands by deriving them from the sensory data. Using the learned control policy, the robot can behave autonomously.

主权项

1. A method for controlling actions of robots, the method comprising:
identifying, at a device that includes a processor, a first context-variable value for a context variable detected by a robot at a sensory-detection time; accessing, at the device, a policy that maps the context variable to a robot action variable; determining that a first robot action characterized by a first value of the robot action variable was performed at an action time in response to detection of the first context-variable value, the first robot action being in accordance with application of the policy; determining that a user input was received at an input time corresponding to the action time, wherein user input data derived from the user input at least partly defines a corrective command that specifies a corrective robot action for physical performance, and the user input being indicative of at least partial dissatisfaction with the robot action; modifying the policy based on the correction command and the context-variable value; and causing the modified policy to be used to
determine a second value of the robot action variable based on a second context-variable value for the context variable detected at a second sensory-detection time; andinitiate performance of a second robot action performance in accordance with the second value of the action variable.