Data-Driven Imitation Learning for a Shopkeeper Robot with Periodically Changing Product Information

Malcolm Doering, Drazen Brscic, Takayuki Kanda

Abstract: Data-driven imitation learning enables service robots to learn social interaction behaviors, but these systems cannot adapt after training to changes in the environment, such as changing products in a store. To solve this, a novel learning system that uses neural attention and approximate string matching to copy information from a product information database to its output is proposed. A camera shop interaction dataset was simulated for training/testing. The proposed system was found to outperform a baseline and a previous state of the art in an offline, human-judged evaluation.