  This paper introduces a novel combination of scheduling control on a flexible
robot manufacturing cell with curiosity based reinforcement learning.
Reinforcement learning has proved to be highly successful in solving tasks like
robotics and scheduling. But this requires hand tuning of rewards in problem
domains like robotics and scheduling even where the solution is not obvious. To
this end, we apply a curiosity based reinforcement learning, using intrinsic
motivation as a form of reward, on a flexible robot manufacturing cell to
alleviate this problem. Further, the learning agents are embedded into the
transportation robots to enable a generalized learning solution that can be
applied to a variety of environments. In the first approach, the curiosity
based reinforcement learning is applied to a simple structured robot
manufacturing cell. And in the second approach, the same algorithm is applied
to a graph structured robot manufacturing cell. Results from the experiments
show that the agents are able to solve both the environments with the ability
to transfer the curiosity module directly from one environment to another. We
conclude that curiosity based learning on scheduling tasks provide a viable
alternative to the reward shaped reinforcement learning traditionally used.
