In recent years, machine learning (and as a result artificial intelligence) has experienced considerable progress. As a result, robots in different shapes and with different purposes have found their ways into our everyday life. These robots, which have been developed with the goal of human companionship, are here to help us in our everyday and routine life. These robots are different to the previous family of robots that were used in factories and static environments. These new robots are social robots that need to be able to adapt to our environment by themselves and to learn from their own experiences. In this paper, we contribute to the creation of robots with a high degree of autonomy, which is a must for social robots. We try to create an algorithm capable of autonomous exploration in and adaptation to unknown environments and implement it in a simulated robot. We go further than a simulation and implement our algorithm in a real robot, in which our sensor fusion method is able to overcome real-world noise and perform robust exploration.
Keywords: adaptive agent; autonomous agent; autonomous exploration; bio-inspired; deep reinforcement learning; obstacle avoidance.