Learning by an autonomous robot at a process control panel

The authors describe initial work in autonomous learning, using HERMIES-IIB, their current robotic experimental testbed. The integrated system in HERMIES-IIB (the hostile environment robotic machine intelligence experiment, series IIB) is the latest in a series of autonomous, intelligent machines designed to perform in environments that humans cannot readily enter. They describe a system that learns the control panel's system dynamics and remembers the most efficient series of responses to shut down a control process in case of future encounters with similar (but not necessarily identical) situations. Ultimately, this system could infer a classification scheme for panel categories, enabling it to hypothesize about correct response sequences for panels not yet encountered. They discuss preliminary work on the system's inferencing section.<<ETX>>