  Future robots should follow human social norms in order to be useful and
accepted in human society. In this paper, we leverage already existing social
knowledge in human societies by capturing it in our framework through the
notion of social norms. We show how norms can be used to guide a reinforcement
learning agent towards achieving normative behavior and apply the same set of
norms over different domains. Thus, we are able to: (1) provide a way to
intuitively encode social knowledge (through norms); (2) guide learning towards
normative behaviors (through an automatic norm reward system); and (3) achieve
a transfer of learning by abstracting policies; Finally, (4) the method is not
dependent on a particular RL algorithm. We show how our approach can be seen as
a means to achieve abstract representation and learn procedural knowledge based
on the declarative semantics of norms and discuss possible implications of this
in some areas of cognitive science.
