While operating in domestic environments, robots will necessarily
face difficulties not envisioned by their developers at programming
time. Moreover, the tasks to be performed by a robot will often
have to be specialized and/or adapted to the needs of specific users
and specific environments. Hence, learning how to operate by interacting
with the user seems a key enabling feature to support the
introduction of robots in everyday environments.
In this paper we contribute a novel approach for learning, through
the interaction with the user, task descriptions that are defined as a
combination of primitive actions. The proposed approach makes
a significant step forward by making task descriptions parametric
with respect to domain specific semantic categories. Moreover, by
mapping the task representation into a task representation language,
we are able to express complex execution paradigms and to revise
the learned tasks in a high-level fashion. The approach is evaluated
in multiple practical applications with a service robot
