No Arabic abstract
Domestic and service robots have the potential to transform industries such as health care and small-scale manufacturing, as well as the homes in which we live. However, due to the overwhelming variety of tasks these robots will be expected to complete, providing generic out-of-the-box solutions that meet the needs of every possible user is clearly intractable. To address this problem, robots must therefore not only be capable of learning how to complete novel tasks at run-time, but the solutions to these tasks must also be informed by the needs of the user. In this paper we demonstrate how behaviour trees, a well established control architecture in the fields of gaming and robotics, can be used in conjunction with natural language instruction to provide a robust and modular control architecture for instructing autonomous agents to learn and perform novel complex tasks. We also show how behaviour trees generated using our approach can be generalised to novel scenarios, and can be re-used in future learning episodes to create increasingly complex behaviours. We validate this work against an existing corpus of natural language instructions, demonstrate the application of our approach on both a simulated robot solving a toy problem, as well as two distinct real-world robot platforms which, respectively, complete a block sorting scenario, and a patrol scenario.
Natural language provides an accessible and expressive interface to specify long-term tasks for robotic agents. However, non-experts are likely to specify such tasks with high-level instructions, which abstract over specific robot actions through several layers of abstraction. We propose that key to bridging this gap between language and robot actions over long execution horizons are persistent representations. We propose a persistent spatial semantic representation method, and show how it enables building an agent that performs hierarchical reasoning to effectively execute long-term tasks. We evaluate our approach on the ALFRED benchmark and achieve state-of-the-art results, despite completely avoiding the commonly used step-by-step instructions.
One significant simplification in most previous work on robot learning is the closed-world assumption where the robot is assumed to know ahead of time a complete set of predicates describing the state of the physical world. However, robots are not likely to have a complete model of the world especially when learning a new task. To address this problem, this extended abstract gives a brief introduction to our on-going work that aims to enable the robot to acquire new state representations through language communication with humans.
In this paper, we propose the Interactive Text2Pickup (IT2P) network for human-robot collaboration which enables an effective interaction with a human user despite the ambiguity in users commands. We focus on the task where a robot is expected to pick up an object instructed by a human, and to interact with the human when the given instruction is vague. The proposed network understands the command from the human user and estimates the position of the desired object first. To handle the inherent ambiguity in human language commands, a suitable question which can resolve the ambiguity is generated. The users answer to the question is combined with the initial command and given back to the network, resulting in more accurate estimation. The experiment results show that given unambiguous commands, the proposed method can estimate the position of the requested object with an accuracy of 98.49% based on our test dataset. Given ambiguous language commands, we show that the accuracy of the pick up task increases by 1.94 times after incorporating the information obtained from the interaction.
Training a supervised neural network classifier typically requires many annotated training samples. Collecting and annotating a large number of data points are costly and sometimes even infeasible. Traditional annotation process uses a low-bandwidth human-machine communication interface: classification labels, each of which only provides several bits of information. We propose Active Learning with Contrastive Explanations (ALICE), an expert-in-the-loop training framework that utilizes contrastive natural language explanations to improve data efficiency in learning. ALICE learns to first use active learning to select the most informative pairs of label classes to elicit contrastive natural language explanations from experts. Then it extracts knowledge from these explanations using a semantic parser. Finally, it incorporates the extracted knowledge through dynamically changing the learning models structure. We applied ALICE in two visual recognition tasks, bird species classification and social relationship classification. We found by incorporating contrastive explanations, our models outperform baseline models that are trained with 40-100% more training data. We found that adding 1 explanation leads to similar performance gain as adding 13-30 labeled training data points.
Human input has enabled autonomous systems to improve their capabilities and achieve complex behaviors that are otherwise challenging to generate automatically. Recent work focuses on how robots can use such input - like demonstrations or corrections - to learn intended objectives. These techniques assume that the humans desired objective already exists within the robots hypothesis space. In reality, this assumption is often inaccurate: there will always be situations where the person might care about aspects of the task that the robot does not know about. Without this knowledge, the robot cannot infer the correct objective. Hence, when the robots hypothesis space is misspecified, even methods that keep track of uncertainty over the objective fail because they reason about which hypothesis might be correct, and not whether any of the hypotheses are correct. In this paper, we posit that the robot should reason explicitly about how well it can explain human inputs given its hypothesis space and use that situational confidence to inform how it should incorporate human input. We demonstrate our method on a 7 degree-of-freedom robot manipulator in learning from two important types of human input: demonstrations of manipulation tasks, and physical corrections during the robots task execution.