A perceptual memory system for affordance learning in humanoid robots

Abstract

Memory constitutes an essential cognitive capability of humans and animals. It allows them to act in very complex, non-stationary environments. In this paper, we propose a perceptual memory system, which is intended to be applied on a humanoid robot learning affordances. According to the properties of biological memory systems, it has been designed in such a way as to enable life-long learning without catastrophic forgetting. Based on clustering sensory information, a symbolic representation is derived automatically. In contrast to alternative approaches, our memory system does not rely on pre-trained models and works completely unsupervised. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.