Autonomous robot controllers capable of acquiring repertoires of complex skills

Abstract

Due to the complexity and sophistication of the skills needed in real world tasks, the development of autonomous robot controllers requires an ever increasing application of learning techniques. To date, however, learning steps are mainly executed in isolation and only the learned code pieces become part of the controller. This approach has several drawbacks: the learning steps themselves are undocumented and not executable. In this paper, we extend an existing control language with constructs for specifying control tasks, process models, learning problems, exploration strategies, etc. Using these constructs, the learning problems can be represented explicitly and transparently and, as they are part of the overall program implementation, become executable. With the extended language we rationally reconstruct large parts of the action selection module of the AGILO2001 autonomous soccer robots.