KnowRob Development in CRC EASE

The Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IAI), led by Prof. Michael Beetz at the University of Bremen, is leading the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) Everyday Activity Science and Engineering (EASE), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). EASE is an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Bremen. Its core purpose is to advance our understanding of how human-scale manipulation tasks can be mastered by robotic agents. To achieve this, EASE establishes the research area Everyday Activity Science and Engineering and creates a research community that conducts open research, open training, open data, and knowledge sharing. In-depth information on EASE research can be found on the website.

EASE is composed of multiple phases. The current phase is the first phase where the focus is on what is called narrative enabled episode memories (NEEMs). NEEMs can be best envisioned as a very detailed story about an experience. The story contains a narrative of what happened, but, in addition, low-level data that represents how it felt to make this experience. The latter case is realized by storing huge amounts of sensor data that is coupled with the narrative through time indexing. The representation of such experiential knowledge is key when statistical models are to be trained that generalize over the highly situation depended information contained in NEEMs. The second phase, which supposedly starts in 2022, will focus more on the generalization of acquired NEEMs.