Robot Learning a New Subfield? The Robolearn-96 Workshop

This article is a position paper on the role of robot learning relative to other disciplines. Our discussion reflects the sentiments expressed at the Robolearn-96 Workshop on this topic. Robot learning is most closely related to the fields of machine learning and robotics but also encompasses aspects of AI and various social sciences such as cognitive psychology. We believe that robot learning is not a proper subset of any of these current fields. A Learning takes place when the system makes changes to its internal structure so as to improve some metric on its long-term future performance, as measured by a fixed standard (Russell 1991, p. 141).