Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey

Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development. Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems. Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future directions of research in SER.Comment: submitted to Advanced Robotic

Object Tracking: Appearance Modeling And Feature Learning

Object tracking in real scenes is an important problem in computer vision due to increasing usage of tracking systems day in and day out in various applications such as surveillance, security, monitoring and robotic vision. Object tracking is the process of locating objects of interest in every frame of video frames. Many systems have been proposed to address the tracking problem where the major challenges come from handling appearance variation during tracking caused by changing scale, pose, rotation, illumination and occlusion. In this dissertation, we address these challenges by introducing several novel tracking techniques. First, we developed a multiple object tracking system that deals specially with occlusion issues. The system depends on our improved KLT tracker for accurate and robust tracking during partial occlusion. In full occlusion, we applied a Kalman filter to predict the object\u27s new location and connect the trajectory parts. Many tracking methods depend on a rectangle or an ellipse mask to segment and track objects. Typically, using a larger or smaller mask will lead to loss of tracked objects. Second, we present an object tracking system (SegTrack) that deals with partial and full occlusions by employing improved segmentation methods: mixture of Gaussians and a silhouette segmentation algorithm. For re-identification, one or more feature vectors for each tracked object are used after target reappearing. Third, we propose a novel Bayesian Hierarchical Appearance Model (BHAM) for robust object tracking. Our idea is to model the appearance of a target as combination of multiple appearance models, each covering the target appearance changes under a certain situation (e.g. view angle). In addition, we built an object tracking system by integrating BHAM with background subtraction and the KLT tracker for static camera videos. For moving camera videos, we applied BHAM to cluster negative and positive target instances. As tracking accuracy depends mainly on finding good discriminative features to estimate the target location, finally, we propose to learn good features for generic object tracking using online convolutional neural networks (OCNN). In order to learn discriminative and stable features for tracking, we propose a novel object function to train OCNN by penalizing the feature variations in consecutive frames, and the tracker is built by integrating OCNN with a color-based multi-appearance model. Our experimental results on real-world videos show that our tracking systems have superior performance when compared with several state-of-the-art trackers. In the feature, we plan to apply the Bayesian Hierarchical Appearance Model (BHAM) for multiple objects tracking

Data-Driven Grasp Synthesis - A Survey

We review the work on data-driven grasp synthesis and the methodologies for sampling and ranking candidate grasps. We divide the approaches into three groups based on whether they synthesize grasps for known, familiar or unknown objects. This structure allows us to identify common object representations and perceptual processes that facilitate the employed data-driven grasp synthesis technique. In the case of known objects, we concentrate on the approaches that are based on object recognition and pose estimation. In the case of familiar objects, the techniques use some form of a similarity matching to a set of previously encountered objects. Finally for the approaches dealing with unknown objects, the core part is the extraction of specific features that are indicative of good grasps. Our survey provides an overview of the different methodologies and discusses open problems in the area of robot grasping. We also draw a parallel to the classical approaches that rely on analytic formulations.Comment: 20 pages, 30 Figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Robotic

Motion clouds: model-based stimulus synthesis of natural-like random textures for the study of motion perception

Choosing an appropriate set of stimuli is essential to characterize the response of a sensory system to a particular functional dimension, such as the eye movement following the motion of a visual scene. Here, we describe a framework to generate random texture movies with controlled information content, i.e., Motion Clouds. These stimuli are defined using a generative model that is based on controlled experimental parametrization. We show that Motion Clouds correspond to dense mixing of localized moving gratings with random positions. Their global envelope is similar to natural-like stimulation with an approximate full-field translation corresponding to a retinal slip. We describe the construction of these stimuli mathematically and propose an open-source Python-based implementation. Examples of the use of this framework are shown. We also propose extensions to other modalities such as color vision, touch, and audition