Priming transformational planning with observations of human activities

Abstract

Abstract-People perform daily activities in many different ways. When setting a table, they might use a tray, stack plates, stack cups on plates, leave the doors of a cupboard open when taking several items out of it. Similarly flexible behavior is desired when mobile robots perform household tasks. Moreover, they should perform actions in a way that they are accepted by the people, for example by showing human-like behavior.In this paper we propose to extend a transformational planning system with models characterizing the behavior produced by the different plans in the plan library. These models are used by the robot to select a plan that resembles human behavior. In addition to acting more human-like, this helps the robot choose good plans for a task by imitating humans instead of performing exhaustive search.We show the feasibility of this approach using a household robot application as an example and present empirical results on the classification accuracy in this domain.

CRAM — A Cognitive Robot Abstract Machine for everyday manipulation in human environments

“…Examples of such transformations are to stack plates or to use a container for transporting objects. Observations of humans can be used for determining which combination of transformations is likely to lead to good performance [24]. Web-enabled robot control: Plans [25] and object models [26] can be imported from the World Wide Web in order to extend the task repertoire and the set of objects the robot can recognize.…”

Knowledge Processing for Cognitive Robots

“…All these modules can be accessed from the robot's knowledge base to analyze observed activities from different viewpoints and at different granularities. Parts of the system have been applied, in conjunction with a transformational planning system, to the imitation of observed human manipulation activities [24]. By performing tasks similar to humans, they can better be understood by people.…”