Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Autonomous Robot Skill Acquisition, George D. Konidaris

Open Access Dissertations

Among the most impressive of aspects of human intelligence is skill acquisition—the ability to identify important behavioral components, retain them as skills, refine them through practice, and apply them in new task contexts. Skill acquisition underlies both our ability to choose to spend time and effort to specialize at particular tasks, and our ability to collect and exploit previous experience to become able to solve harder and harder problems over time with less and less cognitive effort.

Hierarchical reinforcement learning provides a theoretical basis for skill acquisition, including principled methods for learning new skills and deploying them during problem solving. …