Variations on a Theme: “It's a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards”

Adapting the perceptual capabilities of mobile robots to new objects or new environments can be a time consuming task. In this paper we focus on specializing perceptual capabilities of mobile robots to new objects through a knowledge based, virtual scene rendering approach. Episodic memories of a robotic agent, gathered during the execution of a task are considered to be the main "theme". Variations of this theme are then generated based on background knowledge about the objects and data gathered with the purpose of learning new models for detection and recognition. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach by adapting the perceptual capabilities of a mobile robot performing pick and place tasks, to recognize new sets of objects.