Teaching Robots New Tasks through Natural Interaction

This chapter focuses on the main challenges and research opportunities in enabling natural interaction to support interactive task learning. Interaction is an exchange of communicative actions between a teacher and a learner. Natural interaction is viewed as an interaction between a human and an agent that leverages ways in which humans naturally communicate and does not require the human to have any prior expertise. The goal of communication is to achieve common ground and allow the learner to acquire new task knowledge. This chapter outlines the different types of knowledge that can be transferred between agents and discusses the perception, action, and coordination capabilities that enable teaching-learning interactions.