Rapid Task Learning for Real Robots

For learning to be useful on real robots, whatever algorithm is used must converge in some “reasonable” amount of time. If each trial step takes on the order of seconds, a million steps would take several months of continuous run time. In many cases such extended runs are neither desirable nor practical. In this chapter we discuss how learning can be speeded up by exploiting properties of the task, sensor configuration, environment, and existing control structure.