Flexible Behavioral Decision Making of Mobile Robot in Dynamic Environment

Abstract

How to achieve flexible behavioral decision making in a dynamic environment is an important prerequisite for a mobile robot to execute various tasks. Traditional methods suffer from discontinuous and unstable learning ability. This article brings the mobile robot continuous and stable learning ability in the dynamic environment, through improving the binding manner between the cerebellum and basal ganglia in the neuromodulatory system proposed in our previous work, thus to enhance its flexible behavioral decision-making performance. Moreover, a more biological significance index, i.e., the curiosity index, <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Cur$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , is designed to mimic the activity switch of the locus coeruleus between the tonic and phasic mode, to modulate the exploration-exploitation tradeoff in the reinforcement learning (RL) of the basal ganglia. Influence of varying learning rate and varying discount rate on the performance of the RL is also investigated. The experiment results in static and dynamic environments, as well as the comparative experiment in the complex maze environment and the complex dynamic environment, demonstrate the potential of the proposed neuromodulatory system.