Abstract The deep supervised and reinforcement learning paradigms (among others) have the potential to endow interactive multimodal social robots with the ability of acquiring skills autonomously. But it is still not very clear yet how they can be best deployed in real world applications. As a step in this direction, we propose a deep learning-based approach for efficiently training a humanoid robot to play multimodal games—and use the game of ‘Noughts and Crosses’ with two variants as a case study. Its minimum requirements for learning to perceive and interact are based on a few hundred example images, a few example multimodal dialogues and physical demonstrations of robot manipulation, and automatic simulations. In addition, we propose novel algorithms for robust visual game tracking and for competitive policy learning with high winning rates, which substantially outperform DQN-based baselines. While an automatic evaluation shows evidence that the proposed approach can be easily extended to new games with competitive robot behaviours, a human evaluation with 130 humans playing with the Pepper robot confirms that highly accurate visual perception is required for successful game play.
In the remainder of the article we describe a deep learning-based approach for efficiently training a robot with the ability of behaving with reasonable performance in a near real world deployment. In particular, we measure the effectiveness of neural-based game move interpretation and the effectiveness of Deep Q-Networks (DQN) @cite_16 for interactive social robots. Field trial results show that the proposed approach can induce reasonable and competitive behaviours, especially when they are not affected by unseen noisy conditions.
@cite_16
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An artificial agent is developed that learns to play a diverse range of classic Atari 2600 computer games directly from sensory experience, achieving a performance comparable to that of an expert human player; this work paves the way to building general-purpose learning algorithms that bridge the divide between perception and action.