Teaching System for Multimodal Object Categorization by Human-Robot Interaction in Mixed Reality

As service robots are becoming essential to support aging societies, teaching them how to perform general service tasks is still a major challenge preventing their deployment in daily-life environments. In addition, developing an artificial intelligence for general service tasks requires bottom-up, unsupervised approaches to let the robots learn from their own observations and interactions with the users. However, compared to the top-down, supervised approaches such as deep learning where the extent of the learning is directly related to the amount and variety of the pre-existing data provided to the robots, and thus relatively easy to understand from a human perspective, the learning status in bottom-up approaches is by their nature much harder to appreciate and visualize. To address these issues, we propose a teaching system for multimodal object categorization by human-robot interaction through Mixed Reality (MR) visualization. In particular, our proposed system enables a user to monitor and intervene in the robot’s object categorization process based on Multimodal Latent Dirichlet Allocation (MLDA) to solve unexpected results and accelerate the learning. Our contribution is twofold by 1) describing the integration of a service robot, MR interactions, and MLDA object categorization in a unified system, and 2) proposing an MR user interface to teach robots through intuitive visualization and interactions.