Towards hierarchical curiosity-driven exploration of sensorimotor models

Curiosity-driven exploration mechanisms have been proposed to allow robots to actively explore high dimensional sensorimotor spaces in an open-ended manner [1], [2]. In such setups, competence-based intrinsic motivations show better results than knowledge-based exploration mechanisms which only monitor the learner's prediction performance [2], [3]. With competence-based intrinsic motivations, the learner explores its sensor space with a bias toward regions which are predicted to yield a high competence progress. Also, throughout its life, a developmental robot has to incrementally explore skills that add up to the hierarchy of previously learned skills, with a constraint being the cost of experimentation. Thus, a hierarchical exploration architecture could allow to reuse the sensorimotor models previously explored and to combine them to explore more efficiently new complex sensorimotor models. Here, we rely more specifically on the R-IAC and SAGG-RIAC series of architectures [3]. These architectures allow the learning of a single mapping between a motor and a sensor space with a competence-based intrinsic motivation. We describe some ways to extend these architectures with different tasks spaces that can be explored in a hierarchical manner, and mechanisms to handle this hierarchy of sensorimotor models that all need to be explored with an adequate amount of trials. We also describe an interactive task to evaluate the hierarchical learning mechanisms, where a robot has to explore its motor space in order to push an object to different locations. The robot can first explore how to make movements with its hand and then reuse this skill to explore the task of pushing an object.