Toward interactive learning of object categories by a robot: A case study with container and non-container objects

This paper proposes an interactive approach to object categorization that is consistent with the principle that a robot´s object representations should be grounded in its sensorimotor experience. The proposed approach allows a robot to: 1) form object categories based on the movement patterns observed during its interaction with objects, and 2) learn a perceptual model to generalize object category knowledge to novel objects. The framework was tested on a container/non-container categorization task. The robot successfully separated the two object classes after performing a sequence of interactive trials. The robot used the separation to learn a perceptual model of containers, which, which, in turn, was used to categorize novel objects as containers or non-containers.