Optimizing Personalized Robot Actions with Ranking of Trajectories

Intelligent robots designed for real-world human interactions need to adapt to the diverse preferences of individuals. Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) offers promising potential to teach robots personalized behaviors by learning through interactions with humans, eliminating the need for intricate, manually crafted reward functions. However, the current PbRL approaches are hampered by sub-optimal feedback efficiency and limited exploration within state and reward spaces, resulting in subpar performance in complex interactive tasks. To enhance the effectiveness of PbRL, we integrate prior task knowledge into the PbRL framework. Subsequently, we develop a reward model based on ranking a set of multiple robot trajectories. This acquired reward is then utilized to refine the robot’s policy, ensuring alignment with human preferences. To validate our method, we showcase its versatility in different human-robot assistive tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach offers a useful, effective, and broadly applicable solution for personalized human-robot interaction.