Towards the Emergence of Procedural Memories from Lifelong Multi-Modal Streaming Memories for Cognitive Robots

Abstract

Various research topics are emerging as the demand for intelligent lifelong interactions between robot and humans increases. Among them, we can find the examination of persistent storage, the continuous unsupervised annotation of memories and the usage of data at high-frequency over long periods of time. We recently proposed a lifelong autobiographical memory architecture tackling some of these challenges, allowing the iCub humanoid robot to 1) create new memories for both actions that are self-executed and observed from humans, 2) continuously annotate these actions in an unsupervised manner, and 3) use reasoning modules to augment these memories a-posteriori. In this paper, we present a reasoning algorithm which generalises the robots’ understanding of actions by finding the point of commonalities with the former ones. In particular, we generated and labelled templates of pointing actions in different directions. This represents a first step towards the emergence of a procedural memory within a long-term autobiographical memory framework for robots.