SiRoK: Situated Robot Knowledge - Understanding the Balance Between Situated Knowledge and Variability

General-purpose robots operating in a variety of environments, such as homes or hospitals, require a way to integrate abstract knowledge that is generalizable across domains with local, domain-specific observations. In this work, we examine different types and sources of data, with the goal of understanding how locally observed data and abstract knowledge might be fused.We introduce the Situated Robot Knowledge (SiRoK) framework that integrates probabilistic abstract knowledge and semantic memory of the local environment. In a series of robot and simulation experiments we examine the tradeoffs in the reliability and generalization of both data sources. Our robot experiments show that the variability of object properties and locations in our knowledge base is indicative of the time it takes to generalize a concept and its validity in the real world. The results of our simulations back that of our robot experiments, and give us insights into which source of knowledge to use for 31 types of object classes that exist in the real world.