Machine Learning and Friends Lunch
A Developmental Organization for Robot Behavior
Rod Grupen
UMass
Abstract
This talk will focus on exploring how learning and development can be structured in robot systems. I will present a developmental "assembler" for constructing reusable temporally extended actions in a sequence. The discussion adopts the traditions of dynamic pattern theory in which behavior is an artifact of coupled dynamical systems with a number of controllable degrees of freedom. In our model, the events that delineate control decisions are derived from the pattern of (dis)equilibria on a working subset of sensorimotor policies. I will show how this architecture can be used to accomplish sequential knowledge gathering and representation tasks and provide examples of the kind of developmental milestones that this approach has already produced in our lab.