STNS-R: a learning method for seamless transplantation from a virtual agent to a physical robot

In this paper, we are concerned with the problem of how a physical robot can get an appropriate internal representation to its task and environment. Learning from experience is effective for the problem, but it is very time-consuming to learn a representation from the beginning in a real environment. On the other hand, the representation learned only in a simulated environment has the risk of not serving the purpose in a real environment because of the uncertainty in sensors, actuators, and the environment. In, order to have the best of both worlds, it is effective to transplant the learned state representation of a virtual agent to a physical robot. For this purpose., we improved our developed incremental learning architecture for use in the real environment and developed a new architecture, called STNS-R. In this architecture, inappropriate negative instances caused by uncertainties are found on the basis of the distribution of instances and removed in order to correct the distorted shapes of the states. The effectiveness of STNS-R is shown in the experimental results