LAUSR

Adaptive learning is critical to helping robots personalize their interactions with people, particularly when considering skills needed by socially assistive robots, such as persuasion. In this letter, we propose a novel, hybrid hierarchical learning architecture for use in social human-robot interaction (HRI) to adapt robot persuasive behaviors to both the static (e.g., need for cognition) and dynamic (e.g., affect) considerations of a user. A learning hierarchy is introduced that uses a contextual bandit approach in the top level to optimize for a static cognition bias and Q-Learning in the lower level to optimize selection of a robot persuasive strategy to deploy that aligns with a user's affect. We compare the performance of our system with a non-hierarchical learning method in simulated experiments for the task of persuading people to do daily exercises. The results show that our hybrid hierarchical architecture outperforms a non-hierarchical benchmark in learning speed and robustness to both longitudinal user change and noisy observations. Our architecture is the first to: 1) persuasively adapt to different users during social HRI considering both static and dynamic user change, and 2) use user state decomposition in persuasive HRI.