An Environment for Robot Learning

This paper describes the progress of a project investigating development of unsupervised robotic learning at a most basic level. The project focuses on the transition between an organism whose genetically evolved competence is purely inherited and one with the added ability to learn from its environment. The framework of the project draws on Rolf Pfeifer's ideas about building complete autonomous systems that he calls "Fungus Eaters". For this project a self-contained environment has been constructed to act as an ecological niche for a mobile robot. It is anticipated that the robot will be able to improve its performance by learning from its interactions with this environment. This paper describes the mobile robot, the environment, and then outlines progress towards developing a method that will allow the robot to formulate a 'value system' that it can use to evaluate the benefit of its actions. All results presented in this paper were obtained by performing experiments using embodied robot systems.