Human and robot perception in large-scale learning from demonstration

We present a study of using a robotic learning from demonstration system capable of collecting large amounts of human-robot interaction data through a web-based interface. We examine the effect of different perceptual mappings between the human teacher and robot on the learning from demonstration. We show that humans are significantly more effective at teaching a robot to navigate a maze when presented with information that is limited to the robot´s perception of the world, even though their task performance measurably suffers when contrasted with users provided with a natural and detailed raw video feed. Robots trained on such demonstrations learn more quickly, perform more accurately and generalize better. We also demonstrate a set of software tools for enabling internet-mediated human-robot interaction and gathering the large datasets that such crowdsourcing makes possible.