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Chris Adams

MOBILE ROBOTICS RESEARCH GROUP

research:

reinforcement learning

 

biological models

social robots

learning by imitation

reinforcement learning

robot shaping

navigation

artificial life

LEGO project

 

Contact: Gillian Hayes
Last updated: Mon Dec 10 11:09:28 2001

There has a been a good deal of interest in recent years in the role that learning mechanisms might have to play in robotics. This work aims to understand how Reinforcement Learning techniques can be used in the automatic programming of behaviour-based controllers for mobile robots. We are currently investigating exploration mechanisms which traverse the state space maximising the gain in information each step (ie. take the action which will tell us most about how to do well). To date an exploration technique for choosing actions in a bandit problem has been developed. This is now being implemented and tested for multi-state problems. The aim of the project is to develop a principled algorithm for integrating teaching and autonomous exploration.

Work on biological learning mechanisms and on connectionist approaches to environment modelling being carried out in the department is also related to RL.

MSc projects: