Probability and Common-Sense: Tandem Towards Robust Robotic Object Recognition in Ambient Assisted Living

Abstract

The suitable operation of mobile robots when providing Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) services calls for robust object recognition capabilities. Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs) have become the de-facto choice in recognition systems aiming to efficiently exploit contextual relations among objects, also dealing with the uncertainty inherent to the robot workspace. However, these models can perform in an incoherent way when operating in a long-term fashion out of the laboratory, e.g. while recognizing objects in peculiar configurations or belonging to new types. In this work we propose a recognition system that resorts to PGMs and common-sense knowledge, represented in the form of an ontology, to detect those inconsistencies and learn from them. The utilization of the ontology carries additional advantages, e.g. the possibility to verbalize the robot’s knowledge. A primary demonstration of the system capabilities has been carried out with very promising results.