Where is my keyboard? Model-based active adaptation of action-space in a humanoid robot

Abstract

Nowadays robots are becoming more ubiquitous, and focus is increasingly put on the variety of tasks they can perform autonomously. However, due to the dynamics of the environment or the robot itself, sometimes the models that were learned in the past do not exactly fit in the present situation. Adaptation mechanisms are of key importance in this case since they enable the robot to reuse prior knowledge, which is useful for the current context. In this work we introduce an active adaptation mechanism which enables a humanoid robot to recover from a failure, exemplified as a displacement of the object it is interacting with.