Transfer of Inter-Robotic Inductive Classifier

In multi-robot deployments, the robots need to share and integrate their own experience and perform transfer learning. Under the assumption that the robots have the same morphology and carry equivalent sensory equipment, the problem of transfer learning can be considered incremental learning. Thus, the transfer learning problem inherits the challenges of incremental learning, such as catastrophic forgetting and concept drift. In catastrophic forgetting, the model abruptly forgets the previously learned knowledge during the learning process. The concept drift arises with different experiences between consecutively sampled models. However, state-of-the-art robotic transfer learning approaches do not address both challenges at once. In this paper, we propose to use an incremental classifier on a transfer learning problem. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated in a real deployment. The robot consistently merges two classifiers learned on two different tasks into a classifier that performs well on both tasks.