An Approach to Task Representation Based on Object Features and Affordances

Multi-purpose service robots must execute their tasks reliably in different situations, as well as learn from humans and explain their plans to them. We address these issues by introducing a knowledge representation scheme to facilitate skill generalization and explainability. This scheme allows representing knowledge of the robot’s understanding of a scene and performed task. We also present techniques for extracting this knowledge from raw data. Such knowledge representation and extraction methods have not been explored adequately in previous research. Our approach does not require any prior knowledge or 3D models of the objects involved. Moreover, the representation scheme is easy to understand for humans. The system is modular so that new recognition or reasoning routines can be added without changing the basic architecture. We developed a computer vision system and a task reasoning module that works with our knowledge representation. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated with two different tasks: hanging items on pegs and stacking one item on another. A formalization of our knowledge representation scheme is presented, showing how the system is capable of learning from a few demonstrations.