Robot learning from humans has been proposed and researched for several decades as a means to enable robots to learn new skills or adapt existing ones to new situations. Recent advances in AI, including learning approaches like reinforcement learning and architectures like transformers and foundation models, combined with access to massive datasets, have created attractive opportunities to apply those data-hungry techniques to this problem. We argue that the focus on massive amounts of pre-collected data, and the resulting learning paradigm, where humans demonstrate and robots learn in isolation, is overshadowing a specialized area of work we term Human-Interactive Robot Learning (HIRL). This paradigm, wherein robots and humans interact during the learning process , is at the intersection of multiple fields (AI, robotics, human–computer interaction, design and others) and holds unique promise. Using HIRL, robots can achieve greater sample efficiency (as humans can provide task knowledge through interaction), align with human preferences (as humans can guide the robot behavior toward their expectations), and explore more meaningfully and safely (as humans can utilize domain knowledge to guide learning and prevent catastrophic failures). This can result in robotic systems that can more quickly and easily adapt to new tasks in human environments. The objective of this article is to provide a broad and consistent overview of HIRL research and to guide researchers toward understanding the scope of HIRL, and current open or underexplored challenges related to four themes—namely, human, robot learning, interaction, and broader context. The article includes concrete use cases to illustrate the interaction between these challenges and inspire further research according to broad recommendations and a call for action for the growing HIRL community.

We propose an experimental ethics-based curricular module for an undergraduate course on Robot Ethics. The proposed module aims to teach students how human subjects research methods can be used to investigate potential ethical concerns arising in human-robot interaction, by engaging those students in real experimental ethics research. In this paper we describe the proposed curricular module, describe our implementation of that module within a Robot Ethics course offered at a medium-sized engineering university, and statistically evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed curricular module in achieving desired learning objectives. While our results do not provide clear evidence of a quantifiable benefit to undergraduate achievement of the described learning objectives, we note that the module did provide additional learning opportunities for graduate students in the course, as they helped to supervise, analyze, and write up the results of this undergraduate-performed research experiment.

Currently, unmanned vehicles support soldiers in a variety of military applications. Typically, a specially-trained user teleoperates these platforms using a large and bulky Operator Control Unit (OCU). The operator's total attention is required for controlling the tedious, low-level aspects of the platform, dramatically reducing his personal situational awareness. Furthermore, these OCUs are both platform and mission specific. Ideally, a soldier could instead carry light-weight and portable multi-purpose devices to act as OCUs for multiple platform/mission scenarios. These devices would support a standard set of OCU functionality (e.g., as driving a ground robot) and additional higher-level task operations (e.g., autonomously patrolling an area). This extended abstract presents the development of apps for a handheld platform that enable both low- and high-level control of an unmanned vehicle.

In the canonical Robot Learning from Demonstration scenario a robot observes performances of a task and then develops an autonomous controller. Current work acknowledges that humans may be suboptimal demonstrators and refines the controller for improved performance. However, there is still an assumption that the demonstrations are successful examples of the task. We here consider the possibility that the human has failed, and propose a model to minimize the possibility of the robot making the same mistakes.

The canonical Robot Learning from Demonstration scenario has a robot observing human demonstrations of a task or behavior in a few situations, and then developing a generalized controller. Current work further refines the learned system, often to perform the task better than the human could. However, the underlying assumption is that the demonstrations are successful, and are appropriate to reproduce. We, instead, consider the possibility that the human has failed in their attempt, and their demonstration is an example of what not to do. Thus, instead of maximizing the similarity of generated behaviors to those of the demonstrators, we examine two methods that deliberately avoid repeating the human's mistakes.

We propose to incrementally learn the segmentation of a demonstrated task into subtasks and the individual subtask policies themselves simultaneously. Previous robot learning from demonstration techniques have either learned the individual subtasks in isolation, combined known subtasks, or used knowledge of the overall task structure to perform segmentation. Our infinite mixture of experts approach instead automatically infers an appropriate partitioning (number of subtasks and assignment of data points to each one) directly from the data. We illustrate the applicability of our technique by learning a suitable set of subtasks from the demonstration of a finite-state machine robot soccer goal scorer.

We are interested in transferring control policies for arbitrary tasks from a human to a robot. Using interactive demonstration via teleoperation as our transfer scenario, we cast learning as statistical regression over sensor-actuator data pairs. Our desire for interactive learning necessitates algorithms that are incremental and realtime. We examine locally weighted projection regression, a popular robotic learning algorithm, and sparse online Gaussian processes in this domain on one synthetic and several robot-generated data sets. We evaluate each algorithm in terms of function approximation, learned task performance, and scalability to large data sets.

Ubiquitous robots need the ability to adapt their behaviour to the changing situations and demands they will encounter during their lifetimes. In particular, non-technical users must be able to modify a robot's behaviour to enable it to perform new, previously unknown tasks. Learning from demonstration is a viable means to transfer a desired control policy onto a robot and mixed-initiative control provides a method for smooth transitioning between learning and acting. We present a learning system (dogged learning) that combines learning from demonstration and mixed initiative control to enable lifelong learning for unknown tasks. We have implemented dogged learning on a Sony Aibo and successfully taught it behaviours such as mimicry and ball seeking