Understanding Contexts Inside Robot and Human Manipulation Tasks through a Vision-Language Model and Ontology System in a Video Stream

Abstract

Manipulation tasks in daily life, such as pouring water, unfold intentionally under specialized manipulation contexts. Being able to process contextual knowledge in these Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) over time can help us understand manipulation intentions, which are essential for an intelligent robot to transition smoothly between various manipulation actions. In this paper, to model the intended concepts of manipulation, we present a vision dataset under a strictly constrained knowledge domain for both robot and human manipulations, where manipulation concepts and relations are stored by an ontology system in a taxonomic manner. Furthermore, we propose a scheme to generate a combination of visual attentions and an evolving knowledge graph filled with commonsense knowledge. Our scheme works with real-world camera streams and fuses an attention-based Vision-Language model with the ontology system. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can successfully represent the evolution of an intended object manipulation procedure for both robots and humans. The proposed scheme allows the robot to mimic human-like intentional behaviors by watching real-time videos. We aim to develop this scheme further for real-world robot intelligence in Human-Robot Interaction.