Do Not Make the Same Mistakes Again and Again: Learning Local Recovery Policies for Navigation from Human Demonstrations

In this letter, we present a human-in-the-loop learning framework for mobile robots to generate effective local policies in order to recover from navigation failures in long-term autonomy. We present an analysis of failure and recovery cases derived from long-term autonomous operation of a mobile robot, and propose a two-layer learning framework that allows to detect and recover from such navigation failures. Employing a learning by demonstration approach, our framework can incrementally learn to autonomously recover from situations it initially needs humans to help with. The learning framework allows for both real-time failure detection and regression using Gaussian processes. Our empirical results on two different failure scenarios indicate that given 40 failure state observations, the true positive rate of the failure detection model exceeds 90%, ending with successful recovery actions in more than 90% of all detected cases.