Robots show us how to teach them: Feedback from robots shapes tutoring behavior during action learning

Vollmer A-L, Mühlig M, Steil JJ, et al. Robots show us how to teach them: Feedback from robots shapes tutoring behavior during action learning. PLoS ONE. 2014;9(3): e91349.Robot learning by imitation requires the detection of a tutor's action demonstration and its relevant parts. Current approaches implicitly assume a unidirectional transfer of knowledge from tutor to learner. The presented work challenges this predominant assumption based on an extensive user study with an autonomously interacting robot. We show that by providing feedback, a robot learner influences the human tutor's movement demonstrations in the process of action learning. We argue that the robot's feedback strongly shapes how tutors signal what is relevant to an action and thus advocate a paradigm shift in robot action learning research toward truly interactive systems learning in and benefiting from interaction