Interactive Bayesian identification of kinematic mechanisms

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of identifying mechanisms based on data gathered while interacting with them. We present a decision-theoretic formulation of this problem, using Bayesian filtering techniques to maintain a distributional estimate of the mechanism type and parameters. In order to reduce the amount of interaction required to arrive at a confident identification, we select actions explicitly to reduce entropy in the current estimate. We demonstrate the approach on a domain with four primitive and two composite mechanisms. The results show that this approach can correctly identify complex mechanisms including mechanisms which are difficult to model analytically. The results also show that entropy-based action selection can significantly decrease the number of actions required to gather the same information.