Following work on joint object-action representations, the functional object-oriented network (FOON) was introduced as a knowledge graph representation for robots. Taking the form of a bipartite graph, a FOON contains symbolic or high-level information that would be pertinent to a robot's understanding of its environment and tasks in a way that mirrors human understanding of actions. In this work, we outline a road-map for future development of FOON and its application in robotic systems for task planning as well as knowledge acquisition from demonstration. We propose preliminary ideas to show how a FOON can be created in a real-world scenario with a robot and human teacher in a way that can jointly augment existing knowledge in a FOON and teach a robot the skills it needs to replicate the demonstrated actions and solve a given manipulation problem.

Robotic applications require both correct task performance and compensation for undefined behaviors. Although deep learning is a promising approach to perform complex tasks, the response to undefined behaviors that are not reflected in the training dataset remains challenging. In a human-robot collaborative task, the robot may adopt an unexpected posture due to collisions and other unexpected events. Therefore, robots should be able to recover from disturbances for completing the execution of the intended task. We propose a compensation method for undefined behaviors by switching between two controllers. Specifically, the proposed method switches between learning-based and model-based controllers depending on the internal representation of a recurrent neural network that learns task dynamics. We applied the proposed method to a pick-and-place task and evaluated the compensation for undefined behaviors. Experimental results from simulations and on a real robot demonstrate the effectiveness and high performance of the proposed method.

Visual search of relevant targets in the environment is a crucial robot skill. We propose a preliminary framework for the execution monitor of a robot task, taking care of the robot attitude to visually searching the environment for targets involved in the task. Visual search is also relevant to recover from a failure. The framework exploits deep reinforcement learning to acquire a "common sense" scene structure and it takes advantage of a deep convolutional network to detect objects and relevant relations holding between them. The framework builds on these methods to introduce a vision-based execution monitoring, which uses classical planning as a backbone for task execution. Experiments show that with the proposed vision-based execution monitor the robot can complete simple tasks and can recover from failures in autonomy.