Sebastian Thrun's talk at Google about winning the DARPA Grand Challenge [0] has a great discussion of training "robots".

Summary:

- the LIDAR had error rates that were not published

- hitting potholes could cause the INS in the car to get confused

- they weren't sure how to fix the errors from the combination of the above

- they ended up just driving the car to generate training data

It worked out well because the computer was predicting if there was an obstacle or not and a split second later the driver of the car would either drive around the real obstacle or the computer would realize that there was no obstacle.

If you've never seen the talk, highly recommend as Thrun is very funny and it's also a time capsule back to when self driving was still a brand new concept.

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8zj5lBpFTY