Robot See Robot Do

This article elaborates the concept of programming a robot by showing it how to do the job. This is often called “learning from demonstrations” or “imitation learning.” Labs at several institutions – for example, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne, the University of Maryland, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute – are experimenting with technology that may one day make imitation learning common for machines. The underlying idea of this approach is to allow an agent to acquire the necessary details of how to perform a task by observing another agent (who already has the relevant expertise) perform the same task. Usually, the learning agent is a robot and the teaching agent is a human. Often, the goal of imitation learning approaches is to extract some high-level details about how to perform the task from recorded demonstrations. Research into imitation learning has achieved some impressive results ranging from training unmanned helicopters to perform complex maneuvers to teaching robots general-purpose manipulation tasks.