Learning Tasks and Skills Together From a Human Teacher

Robot Learning from Demonstration (LfD) research deals with the challenges of enabling humans to teach robots novel skills and tasks (Argall et al. 2009). The practical importance of LfD is due to the fact that it is impossible to pre-program all the necessary skills and task knowledge that a robot might need during its life-cycle. This poses many interesting application areas for LfD ranging from houses to factory floors. An important motivation for our research agenda is that in many of the practical LfD applications, the teacher will be an everyday end-user, not an expert in Machine Learning or robotics. Thus, our research explores the ways in which Machine Learning can exploit human social learning interactions--Socially Guided Machine Learning (SGML).