Learning the behavior model of a robot

  • Authors:
  • Guillaume Infantes;Malik Ghallab;Félix Ingrand

  • Affiliations:
  • ONERA, Toulouse, France;INRIA, Paris, France;LAAS-CNRS, University of Toulouse, Toulouse, France

  • Venue:
  • Autonomous Robots
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Complex artifacts are designed today from well specified and well modeled components. But most often, the models of these components cannot be composed into a global functional model of the artifact. A significant observation, modeling and identification effort is required to get such a global model, which is needed in order to better understand, control and improve the designed artifact.Robotics provides a good illustration of this need. Autonomous robots are able to achieve more and more complex tasks, relying on more advanced sensor-motor functions. To better understand their behavior and improve their performance, it becomes necessary but more difficult to characterize and to model, at the global level, how robots behave in a given environment. Low-level models of sensors, actuators and controllers cannot be easily combined into a behavior model. Sometimes high level models operators used for planning are also available, but generally they are too coarse to represent the actual robot behavior.We propose here a general framework for learning from observation data the behavior model of a robot when performing a given task. The behavior is modeled as a Dynamic Bayesian Network, a convenient stochastic structured representations. We show how such a probabilistic model can be learned and how it can be used to improve, on line, the robot behavior with respect to a specific environment and user preferences. Framework and algorithms are detailed; they are substantiated by experimental results for autonomous navigation tasks.