Learning Relational Instance-Based Policies from User Demonstrations

Demonstration-based learning has the advantage that a user can easily teach his/her robot new task knowledge just by demonstrating directly how to perform the task. However, many previous demonstration-based learning techniques used a kind of attribute-value vector model to represent their state spaces and policies. Due to the limitation of this model, they suffered from both low efficiency of the learning process and low reusability of the learned policy. In this paper, we present a new demonstration-based learning method, in which the relational model is adopted in place of the attribute-value model. Applying the relational instance-based learning to the training examples extracted from the records of the user demonstrations, the method derives a relational instance-based policy which can be easily utilized for other similar tasks in the same domain. A relational policy maps a context, represented as a pair of (state, goal), to a corresponding action to be executed. In this paper, we give a detail explanation of our demonstration-based relational policy learning method, and then analyze the effectiveness of our learning method through some experiments using a robot simulator.