Incremental Robot Learning of New Objects with Fixed Update Time
This work addresses incremental learning for robots to handle new objects efficiently, though it appears incremental in method.
The paper tackles the problem of lifelong object recognition for robots by proposing an incremental variant of the Regularized Least Squares for Classification algorithm, which achieves comparable or higher performance than batch methods on unbalanced datasets while being significantly faster.
We consider object recognition in the context of lifelong learning, where a robotic agent learns to discriminate between a growing number of object classes as it accumulates experience about the environment. We propose an incremental variant of the Regularized Least Squares for Classification (RLSC) algorithm, and exploit its structure to seamlessly add new classes to the learned model. The presented algorithm addresses the problem of having an unbalanced proportion of training examples per class, which occurs when new objects are presented to the system for the first time. We evaluate our algorithm on both a machine learning benchmark dataset and two challenging object recognition tasks in a robotic setting. Empirical evidence shows that our approach achieves comparable or higher classification performance than its batch counterpart when classes are unbalanced, while being significantly faster.