A robot recognizing everyday objects-towards robot as autonomous knowledge media

We discuss roles of robots as autonomous knowledge media and show our prototype system of an office work assistant robot based on this approach. We are surrounded by a huge amount of artifacts and information that is difficult for humans to deal with. Robots can help people by gathering and arranging information intelligently instead of people themselves. Our prototype system called Kappa III is an office work assistant robot that can tell people the location of daily goods in the office. It firstly looks around to capture images of desks in order to remember what and where such goods are. Then it can identify them by cutting them out from the background and categorizing them by color, shape, and figure. People can ask it to take goods in the office by either specifying names or features such as color. We also realized discovery of objects three-dimensionally by comparing captured scenes with expected ones