Learning from the Wizard: Autonomous Social Robots through Teleoperated Demonstrations

This project extends the widely used Learning from Demonstration (LfD) paradigm to the domain of freeform social interaction. Social robots are used today for therapy or education. Because of the inherent difficulties of creating autonomous social interaction behavior, a human secretly controls most of these robots in what is called “Wizard-of-Oz” (WoZ) control. We developed a computational and experimental framework that records these WoZ demonstrations, and uses a hierarchical logistic regression model that allows the robot to choose actions autonomously, in the style of the human demonstrator. Because the demonstrations are sourced from Wizard-of-Oz interactions, we refer to our method as Learning from the Wizard (LfW).