Robots are extending their presence in domestic environments every day, it being more common to see them carrying out tasks in home scenarios. In the future, robots are expected to increasingly perform more complex tasks and, therefore, be able to acquire experience from different sources as quickly as possible. A plausible approach to address this issue is interactive feedback, where a trainer advises a learner on which actions should be taken from specific states to speed up the learning process. Moreover, deep reinforcement learning has been recently widely used in robotics to learn the environment and acquire new skills autonomously. However, an open issue when using deep reinforcement learning is the excessive time needed to learn a task from raw input images. In this work, we propose a deep reinforcement learning approach with interactive feedback to learn a domestic task in a Human–Robot scenario. We compare three different learning methods using a simulated robotic arm for the task of organizing different objects; the proposed methods are (i) deep reinforcement learning (DeepRL); (ii) interactive deep reinforcement learning using a previously trained artificial agent as an advisor (agent–IDeepRL); and (iii) interactive deep reinforcement learning using a human advisor (human–IDeepRL). We demonstrate that interactive approaches provide advantages for the learning process. The obtained results show that a learner agent, using either agent–IDeepRL or human–IDeepRL, completes the given task earlier and has fewer mistakes compared to the autonomous DeepRL approach.

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The increasing need for real time robotic systems capable of performing tasks in changing and constrained environments demands the development of reliable and adaptable motion planning and control algorithms. This paper considers a mobile robot whose performance is measured by the completion of temporal logic tasks within a certain period of time. In addition to such time constraints, the planning algorithm must also deal with changes in the robot's workspace during task execution. In our case, the robot is deployed in a partitioned environment subjected to structural changes in which doors shift from open to closed and vice-versa. The motion of the robot is modeled as a Continuous Time Markov Decision Process and the robot's mission is expressed as a Continuous Stochastic Logic (CSL) temporal logic specification. An approximate solution to find a control strategy that satisfies such specifications is derived for a subset of probabilistic CSL formulae. Simulation and experimental results are provided to illustrate the method.

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