A Personalized Household Assistive Robot that Learns and Creates New Breakfast Options through Human-Robot Interaction
This addresses the challenge of personalization and creativity in assistive robots for household users, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods for a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of household assistive robots needing to learn personalized tasks and generate creative variations to avoid monotony, presenting a cognitive architecture that learns personalized breakfast options from users and creates new ones, validated in a proof-of-concept system evaluation.
For robots to assist users with household tasks, they must first learn about the tasks from the users. Further, performing the same task every day, in the same way, can become boring for the robot's user(s), therefore, assistive robots must find creative ways to perform tasks in the household. In this paper, we present a cognitive architecture for a household assistive robot that can learn personalized breakfast options from its users and then use the learned knowledge to set up a table for breakfast. The architecture can also use the learned knowledge to create new breakfast options over a longer period of time. The proposed cognitive architecture combines state-of-the-art perceptual learning algorithms, computational implementation of cognitive models of memory encoding and learning, a task planner for picking and placing objects in the household, a graphical user interface (GUI) to interact with the user and a novel approach for creating new breakfast options using the learned knowledge. The architecture is integrated with the Fetch mobile manipulator robot and validated, as a proof-of-concept system evaluation in a large indoor environment with multiple kitchen objects. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our architecture to learn personalized breakfast options from the user and generate new breakfast options never learned by the robot.