Covert Perceptual Capability Development

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a model to develop robots’ covert perceptual capability using reinforcement learning. Covert perceptual behavior is treated as action selected by a motivational system. We apply this model to vision-based navigation. The goal is to enable a robot to learn road boundary type. Instead of dealing with problems in controlled environments with a low-dimensional state space, we test the model on images captured in non-stationary environments. Incremental Hierarchical Discriminant Regression is used to generate states on the fly. Its coarse-to-fine tree structure guarantees real-time retrieval in high-dimensional state space. K Nearest-Neighbor strategy is adopted to further reduce training time complexity.