A Motivation-Based Action-Selection-Mechanism Involving Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: An action-selection-mechanism (ASM) has been proposed to work as a fully connected finite state machine to deal with sequential behaviors as well as to allow a state in the task program to migrate to any state in the task, in which a primitive node in association with a state and its transitional conditions can be easily inserted/deleted. Also, such a primitive node can be learned by a shortest path-finding-based reinforcement learning technique. Specifically, we define a behavioral motivation as having state-dependent value as a primitive node for action selection, and then sequentially construct a network of behavioral motivations in such a way that the value of a parent node is allowed to flow into a child node by a releasing mechanism. A vertical path in a network represents a behavioral sequence. Here, such a tree for our proposed ASM can be newly generated and/or updated whenever a new behavior sequence is learned. To show the validity of our proposed ASM, experimental results of a mobile robot performing the task of pushing-a-box-into-a-goal (PBIG) will be illustrated