A Personalized Household Assistive Robot that Learns and Creates New Breakfast Options through Human-Robot Interaction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cognitive architecture for a household assistive robot that learns personalized breakfast options through human interaction and creatively generates new options, enhancing household task assistance.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel cognitive architecture integrating perceptual learning, memory models, and a task planner, enabling a robot to learn and create new breakfast options over time.

Findings

Robot successfully learned personalized breakfast options.

Robot generated new breakfast options not previously learned.

Architecture proved effective in a real indoor kitchen environment.

Abstract

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.