Using The Concept Hierarchy for Household Action Recognition

Abstract--We propose a method to systematically represent both the static and the dynamic components of environments, i.e. objects and agents, as well as the changes that are happening in the environment, i.e. the actions and skills performed by agents. Our approach, the Concept Hierarchy, provides the necessary information for autonomous systems to represent environment states, perform action modeling and recognition, and plan the execution of tasks. Additionally, the hierarchical structure supports generalization and knowledge transfer to environments. We rigorously define tasks, actions, skills, and affordances that Figure 1: "How to transform the left environment into the right one?" enable human-understandable action and skill recognition. The knowledge in the Concept Hierarchy enables household robots to represent environments and to create a plan to execute tasks. Furthermore, there is no clear distinction between a task, an action, and a skill.