Robot Interactive Learning through Human Assistance

Humans live interacting with other people and do everyday tasks in individual and collective ways. Robotics people are interested in building robots that can interact with people in the same way that humans do. In order to reach this goal robots must learn from the interaction with humans and learn the human skills used in everyday life to acquire robot social behaviors that can then be used in a wide range of real-world scenarios: domestic tasks, shopping, assistance, guidance, entertainment, surveillance, rescue or industrial shop-floor. There are many examples where this interaction occurs, but some of them are very basic and people do not realize the extreme difficulty that entails executing such tasks for a robot. For example, the navigation in crowded environments, such as crossing streets or shopping malls, or the social engagement for initiate a conversation, are simple examples where this interaction occurs. In the last years important academic and private research efforts have been carried out in this field. Examples can be seen in automatic exploration sites [29], evacuation of people in emergency situations [4], crafting robots that operate as team members [26], therapists [7], robotics services [22] or robot guiding [15, 14] In this chapter we will present some examples where the robots learn from the interaction with humans using the general multimodal interaction framework. We will show how the general multimodal system is used in three specific tasks namely: interactive motion learning for robot companion; robot’s proactively seeking interaction; and online face learning using robot vision. There has been already described the general multimodal interactive framework shown in Fig. 1. As it can be seen in the framework, the model can be learned offline or on-line, and the human (the oracle) uses the information coming from inputs