Bayesian interaction shaping: learning to influence strategic interactions in mixed robotic domains

Despite recent advances in getting autonomous robots to follow instructions from humans, strategically intelligent robot behaviours have received less attention. Strategic intelligence entails influence over the beliefs of other interacting agents, possibly adversarial. In this paper, we present a learning framework for strategic interaction shaping in physical robotic systems, where an autonomous robot must lead an unknown adversary to a desired joint state. Offline, we learn composable interaction templates, represented as shaping regions and tactics, from human demonstrations. Online, the agent empirically learns the adversary’s responses to executed tactics, and the reachability of different regions. Interaction shaping is effected by selecting tactic sequences through Bayesian inference over the expected reachability of their traversed regions. We experimentally evaluate our approach in an adversarial soccer penalty task between NAO robots, by comparing an autonomous shaping robot with and against human-controlled agents. Results, based on 650 trials and a diverse group of 30 human subjects, demonstrate that the shaping robot performs comparably to the best human-controlled robots, in interactions with a heuristic autonomous adversary. The shaping robot is also shown to progressively improve its influence over a more challenging strategic adversary controlled by an expert human user.