Grounding of Human Environments and Activities for Autonomous Robots

With the recent proliferation of robotic applications in domestic and industrial scenarios, it is vital for robots to continually learn about their environments and about the humans they share their environments with. In this paper, we present a framework for autonomous, unsupervised learning from various sensory sources of useful human ‘concepts’; including colours, people names, usable objects and simple activities. This is achieved by integrating state-of-the-art object segmentation, pose estimation, activity analysis and language grounding into a continual learning framework. Learned concepts are grounded to natural language if commentary is available, allowing the robot to communicate in a human-understandable way. We show, using a challenging, real-world dataset of human activities, that our framework is able to extract useful concepts, ground natural language descriptions to them, and, as a proof-of-concept, to generate simple sentences from templates to describe people and activities.