A Behavior-Grounded Approach to Forming Object Categories: Separating Containers From Noncontainers

This paper introduces a framework that allows a robot to form a single behavior-grounded object categorization after it uses multiple exploratory behaviors to interact with objects and multiple sensory modalities to detect the outcomes that each behavior produces. Our robot observed acoustic and visual outcomes from six different exploratory behaviors performed on 20 objects (containers and noncontainers). Its task was to learn 12 different object categorizations (one for each behavior-modality combination), and then to unify these categorizations into a single one. In the end, the object categorization acquired by the robot matched closely the object labels provided by a human. In addition, the robot acquired a visual model of containers and noncontainers based on its unified categorization, which it used to label correctly 29 out of 30 novel objects.

I. Introduction

Object categorization is a fundamental skill that emerges early in the course of human infant development [3]. From the moment infants begin to manipulate objects, they can identify differences between them in terms of the sensations that the objects produce [4]. As infants gain more control over their bodies, they begin to grasp, mouth, scratch, and bang objects in order to learn about them [5]. These exploratory behaviors and the sensations that they produce lay the foundations for forming many different object categories [6].