Learning Symbolic Task Representation from a Human-Led Demonstration: A Memory to Store, Retrieve, Consolidate, and Forget Experiences

Abstract

We present a symbolic learning framework inspired by cognitive-like memory functionalities (i.e., storing, retrieving, consolidating and forgetting) to generate task representations to support high-level task planning and knowledge bootstrapping. We address a scenario involving a non-expert human, who performs a single task demonstration, and a robot, which online learns structured knowledge to re-execute the task based on experiences, i.e., observations. We consider a one-shot learning process based on non-annotated data to store an intelligible representation of the task, which can be refined through interaction, e.g., via verbal or visual communication. Our general-purpose framework relies on fuzzy Description Logic, which has been used to extend the previously developed Scene Identification and Tagging algorithm. In this paper, we exploit such an algorithm to implement cognitive-like memory functionalities employing scores that rank memorised observations over time based on simple heuristics. Our main contribution is the formalisation of a framework that can be used to systematically investigate different heuristics for bootstrapping hierarchical knowledge representations based on robot observations. Through an illustrative assembly task scenario, the paper presents the performance of our framework to discuss its benefits and limitations.