Abstract

One of the open problems in autonomous robotics is how to consistently and scalably integrate new behaviors into a robot with an existing behavioral repertoire. In this work a new technique called behavior chaining is introduced, which allows for gradually expanding the behavioral repertoire of a dynamically behaving robot. The approach relies heavily on scaffolding: gradually restructuring the robot’s environment such that selection pressure favors the incorporation of a new behavior. This method teaches a robot a compound behavior not yet reported in the literature: dynamic legged locomotion toward an object followed by grasping, lifting and holding of that object in a physically-realistic three-dimensional environment. The method assumes that success is dependent on the order in which behaviors are learned. This is justified by results which show that if a robot is forced to learn lifting first and then incorporate locomotion, it eventually succeeds at both more often than a robot forced to learn locomotion first and then lifting.

Citations