title: Curiosity driven reinforcement learning for motion planning on humanoids.
abstract: Most previous work on artificial curiosity (AC) and intrinsic motivation focuses on basic concepts and theory. Experimental results are generally limited to toy scenarios, such as navigation in a simulated maze, or control of a simple mechanical system with one or two degrees of freedom. To study AC in a more realistic setting, we embody a curious agent in the complex iCub humanoid robot. Our novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework consists of a state-of-the-art, low-level, reactive control layer, which controls the iCub while respecting constraints, and a high-level curious agent, which explores the iCub's state-action space through information gain maximization, learning a world model from experience, controlling the actual iCub hardware in real-time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever embodied, curious agent for real-time motion planning on a humanoid. We demonstrate that it can learn compact Markov models to represent large regions of the iCub's configuration space, and that the iCub explores intelligently, showing interest in its physical constraints as well as in objects it finds in its environment.
authors.affiliation: Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Lugano, Switzerland ; Facoltà di Scienze Informatiche, Università della Svizzera Italiana Lugano, Switzerland ; Dipartimento Tecnologie Innovative, Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana Manno, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Mikhail
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Frank
authors.affiliation: Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Lugano, Switzerland ; Facoltà di Scienze Informatiche, Università della Svizzera Italiana Lugano, Switzerland ; Dipartimento Tecnologie Innovative, Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana Manno, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Jürgen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Leitner
authors.affiliation: Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Lugano, Switzerland ; Facoltà di Scienze Informatiche, Università della Svizzera Italiana Lugano, Switzerland ; Dipartimento Tecnologie Innovative, Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana Manno, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Marijn
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Stollenga
authors.affiliation: Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Lugano, Switzerland ; Facoltà di Scienze Informatiche, Università della Svizzera Italiana Lugano, Switzerland ; Dipartimento Tecnologie Innovative, Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana Manno, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Alexander
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Förster
authors.affiliation: Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence Lugano, Switzerland ; Facoltà di Scienze Informatiche, Università della Svizzera Italiana Lugano, Switzerland ; Dipartimento Tecnologie Innovative, Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana Manno, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Jürgen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Schmidhuber
keywords: artificial curiosity; embodied AI; humanoid; iCub; intrinsic motivation; reinforcement learning