Using a shared tablet workspace for interactive demonstrations during human-robot learning scenarios

One of the key elements for building a long-term robotic companion is incorporating the ability for a robot to continuously learn and engage in new tasks. Utilizing a defined workspace that provides various shared content between human and robot could assist in this learning process. Here, we propose integrating a touchscreen tablet and a robot learner for engaging the user during human-robot interaction scenarios. The robot learner´s domain-independent core reasoner follows the structure of instance-based learning which addresses the issues of acquiring knowledge, encoding cases, and learning a retrieval metric. The system utilizes demonstrations provided by the user to auto-populate the knowledge base through natural interaction methods, encodes cases based on the feature structure provided by the user, and uses an adaptive-weighting technique to design a retrieval metric with linear regression in the feature-distance space. Through a tablet environment, the user teaches a task to the robot in a shared workspace and intuitively monitors the robot´s behavior and progress in real time. In this setting, the user is able to interrupt the robot and provide necessary demonstrations at the moment learning is taking place, thus providing a means to continuously engage both the participant and the robot in the learning cycle.