The benefit of social robots to support child learning in an educational context over an extended period of time is evaluated. Specifically, the effect of personalisation and adaptation of robot social behaviour is assessed. Two autonomous robots were embedded within two matched classrooms of a primary school for a continuous two week period without experimenter supervision to act as learning c...

The goal of robot learning from demonstration is to have a robot learn from watching a demonstration of the task to be performed. In our approach to learning from demonstration the robot learns a reward function from the demonstration and a task model from repeated attempts to perform the task. A policy is computed based on the learned reward function and task model. Lessons learned from an imp...

This paper presents a visual/motor behavior learning approach, based on neural networks. We propose Behavior Chain Model (BCM) in order to create a way of behavior learning. Our behavior-based system evolution task is a mobile robot detecting a target and driving/acting towards it. First, the mapping relations between the image feature domain of the object and the robot action domain are derive...

Imitation is not only a powerful means to drastically downsize the exploration space when learning behavior. It also helps to align the learning efforts of a robot group towards a common goal. However, one prerequisite in imitation, the decision of which robot to imitate, is often factored out in current research. In our work we address this question by providing a means to measure the similari...

Learning by imitation is a form of learning, which despite the fact it has been widely studied by ethologists, has not been fully understood yet. In fact, there is a considerable disagreement even on the terminology used despite attempts to clarify it (Davis,1973; Galef, 1988;). We believe that by building robots which instantiate the mechanisms hypothesised to underlie these types of behaviour...