AUTHOR=Gu Shangding , Kshirsagar Alap , Du Yali , Chen Guang , Peters Jan , Knoll Alois 

TITLE=A human-centered safe robot reinforcement learning framework with interactive behaviors

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Neurorobotics

VOLUME=Volume 17 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neurorobotics/articles/10.3389/fnbot.2023.1280341

DOI=10.3389/fnbot.2023.1280341

ISSN=1662-5218

ABSTRACT=Deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for robotics applications in the real world requires ensuring the safety of the robot and its environment. Safe Robot RL (SRRL) is a crucial step towards achieving human-robot coexistence. In this paper, we envision a human-centered SRRL framework consisting of three stages: safe exploration, safety value alignment, and safe collaboration. We examine the research gaps in these areas and propose to leverage interactive behaviors for SRRL. Interactive behaviors enable bi-directional information transfer between humans and robots, such as conversational robot ChatGPT [61]. We argue that interactive behaviors need further attention from the SRRL community. We discuss four open challenges related to the robustness, efficiency, transparency, and adaptability of SRRL with interactive behaviors.