Structural bootstrapping at the sensorimotor level for the fast acquisition of action knowledge for cognitive robots

Autonomous robots are faced with the problem of encoding complex actions (e.g. complete manipulations) in a generic and generalizable way. Recently we had introduced the Semantic Event Chains (SECs) as a new representation which can be directly computed from a stream of 3D images and is based on changes in the relationships between objects involved in a manipulation. Here we show that the SEC framework can be extended (called “extended SEC”) with action-related information and used to achieve and encode two important cognitive properties relevant for advanced autonomous robots: The extended SEC enables us to determine whether an action representation (1) needs to be newly created and stored in its entirety in the robot's memory or (2) whether one of the already known and memorized action representations just needs to be refined. In human cognition these two processes (1 and 2) are known as accommodation and assimilation. Thus, here we show that the extended SEC representation can be used to realize these processes originally defined by Piaget for the first time in a robotic application. This is of fundamental importance for any cognitive agent as it allows categorizing observed actions in new versus known ones, storing only the relevant aspects.